Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England Part 6

Perhaps the most striking social feature of these centuries is the way in which the Church opened up a career to all ranks and cla.s.ses of the people. The great landed families still maintained friendly relations with the monasteries which their forbears had founded, and sometimes contributed one of their cadets to the cloister, and perhaps in time secured his nomination to the abbacy; the lords of the manors continued to present their younger sons to the rectories; so that there was always a strong aristocratic element among the clergy. The vicars were for the most part the nominees of the religious houses, and the conjecture that abbots and priors, and abbesses, and prioresses, and dignitaries of the houses, not infrequently presented their relatives, and sometimes clerks in the service of the house, is supported by some actual examples.

The middle cla.s.ses supplied a great number of the clergy who filled the offices of parish chaplain (= a.s.sistant-curates), chantry priest, guild priest, and the like; and many of these, by force of learning, character, and good service, rose to higher offices. Even young men of the servile cla.s.s were not excluded from the ranks of the clergy. The slaves whom Gregory and Aidan, and others, redeemed and trained as priests, may have been young men of good family taken captive in war; but in the thirteenth and subsequent centuries young men born and bred serfs were not infrequently educated and ordained, and given fair chance of promotion. It is true they were under special legal disabilities. A serf could not be himself ordained, or send his children to school without his lord's leave, for they were _adscripti glaebe_, bound to the soil, and their labour and their children's labour (or a portion of it, carefully defined by law and custom) was an important part of the property of their lord; the canons of the Church, moreover, from a very early period, had made servile birth a disqualification for Holy Orders;[124] but in the thirteenth, and especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there are numerous examples in which a serf gave a fine to his lord for leave to send his son to school, and kindly lords not infrequently gave the right gratis to a promising youth, and his ultimate freedom; and the Church frequently, probably usually, as a matter of course, gave a dispensation _de defectu natalium_.

From the single manor of Woolrichston, in Warwicks.h.i.+re, we get these ill.u.s.trations of the text:--In 1361, Walter Martin paid 5_s._ for the privilege of putting his son _ad scholas_. In 1371, William Potter fined in 13_s._ 4_d._, that his eldest son may go _ad scholas_ and take Orders.

Stephen Sprot fined in 3_s._ 4_d._, that he might send his son Richard _ad scholas_. William Henekyn fined in 5_s._, to marry his daughter Alice. In 1335, William at Water paid for licence for his younger son William _ad sacrum ordinem promovendum_.[125]

Here is another example. In 1312, the Bishop of Durham gave license to his _nativus_, Walter de Hoghington, clerk, to receive all Divine orders, and renounced his _jus domini_.[126]

And this liberal sentiment was based upon the profoundest principle. When the King's School at Canterbury was reorganized, at the time of the Reformation, some of the commissioners to whom the work was committed wished to limit the school to the children of gentlemen. It was for the ploughman's son, they argued, to go to plough, and the artificer's son to apply to the trade of his parents' vocation; and the gentleman's children are used to have the knowledge of government and rule of the commonwealth.

"I grant," replied Archbishop Cranmer, who was one of the commissioners, "much of your meaning herein as needful in a commonwealth; but yet utterly to exclude the ploughman's son and the poor man's son from the benefit of learning, as though they were unworthy to have the gifts of the Holy Ghost bestowed upon them as well as upon others, was as much as to say that Almighty G.o.d should not be at liberty to bestow His great gifts of grace upon any person but as we and other men shall appoint them to be employed according to our fancy, and not according to His most goodly will and pleasure, who giveth His gifts of learning and other perfections in all sciences unto all kinds and states of people indifferently."[127]

There were always some who took the less liberal view which the archbishop thus n.o.bly rebuked. Even in the twelfth century, Walter Map (one of the clerks in the civil service of Henry II., holding various ecclesiastical preferments; he died in 1209) complains that villeins were attempting to educate their "ign.o.ble and degenerate offspring" in the liberal arts.

The author of the "Vision of Piers Plowman" gives utterance to the same illiberal prejudices as the n.o.ble colleagues of Cranmer. He thinks that "Bondmen and beggars' children belong to labour, and should serve lords'

sons, and lords' sons should serve G.o.d, as belongeth to their degree;" and complains that "bondmen's bairns should be made bishops, and that popes and patrons should refuse gentle blood and take Symond's son to keep sanctuary."[128]

In another place the same writer says, in the same strain--

Now might each sowter[129] his son setten to schole And each beggar's brat in the book learne, And worth to a writer and with a lorde dwelle, Or falsely to a frere the fiend for to serven.

So of that beggar's brat a Bishop that worthen, Among the peers of the land prese to sytten; And lorde's sons lowly to the lordes loute Knyghtes crooketh hem to, and crowcheth ful lowe; And his sire a sowter[129] y-soiled with grees, His teeth with toyling of leather battered as a saw.

The writer of "Symon's Lesson of Wisdom for Children," in a much more genial spirit, jestingly encourages the children to be diligent in their lessons by holding out the prize of succession to the see:

And lerne as faste as thou can, For our byshop is an old man, And therfor thou must lerne faste If thou wilt be byshop when he is past.[130]

The better spirit prevailed. The lower cla.s.ses had the inevitable disadvantages of their origin to contend with, but every cathedral and religious house had its schools, which were ready enough to admit boys who were seen to possess those "gifts of the Holy Ghost" which might, if duly cultivated, make them useful in Church and State; and it was regarded as the duty of ecclesiastical persons to look out for such boys, and support them in their career. Richard II. rejected a proposal to forbid villeins to send their children to school "to learn clergee;" and the triumph of the more liberal sentiment was legally secured by the Statute of Artificers pa.s.sed by Parliament in 1406, which 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."

The career which was thus thrown open to all cla.s.ses of the people was a much larger one than appears at first sight. Not only all the offices and dignities of the Church, from that of stipendiary chaplain to that of bishop or even of Pope, were open to all comers, but also all the offices of the State which required learning as a qualification were open to every clerk. For the kings took the officials of the civil departments of the Government very largely from the ranks of the clergy; and, by a great abuse of their patronage, paid them for their services to the State by promotion to the emoluments and dignities of the Church.[131]

Some of the satirists found fault with this state of things, but, in fact, the man of humble birth, who had risen to high rank in the Church by force of his own learning and character, had little to fear from illiberal reflections upon the lowliness of his origin. The men who had risen from the grammar school of some village or obscure town to rank and wealth were so far from trying to hide the obscurity of their origin, that it was the general custom of dignified ecclesiastics to drop their patronymic and take the name of their birthplace instead. Thus, he whom we familiarly call Thomas-a-Becket was known to his contemporaries as Thomas of London; the family name of Thomas of Rotherham, Archbishop of York, was Scot; the family name of the ill.u.s.trious bishop and statesman, William of Wyckham, was Longe; and that of William of Wayneflete was Barlow.[132] Another good custom was that such men frequently raised for themselves a lasting monument in their native place by founding a free school in the village, or a college or hospital in the town.[133]

From the school of the cathedral or monastery, or of the parish priest, the ambitious student whose means permitted it went to some more famous centre of learning: in Saxon times, to the schools of Canterbury or York or Winchester; in later times, to the universities which were organized under the auspices of the Church in the various countries of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Bologna was famous as a School of Law; Paris took the lead in Theology; Salerno in Medicine. Here, in England, Oxford and Cambridge were centres of learning at the close of the twelfth century, and organized universities early in the thirteenth. Oxford in the thirteenth century had a European reputation second only to that of Paris.

The period from the awakening of new religious and scientific thought in the eleventh century through the two following centuries, was one of great intellectual activity throughout Europe. The isolated Saxon Church had been little affected by the new learning; but the first Norman archbishop, Lanfranc, was one of the foremost scholars of the time, and Anselm, his successor, was more than that, being one of the greatest thinkers of Christian Europe; and from their time onward Englishmen held a place among the most learned men of Europe.

In those days, as in these--and indeed in all days--men had different natural temperaments--some a contemplative and spiritual disposition, some an inquiring scientific turn of mind, others a rationalizing and practical bias; some leaned upon authority, others were speculative and self-confident. Great freedom of thought was permitted, and of the expression of thought, and yet England was very little troubled by heresies. From the beginning of the English Church to the beginning of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the excessive doctrines of Lollardism in the fourteenth century--when they seemed to threaten the very bases of social order both in Church and State--alone called forth any serious action on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities against the open expression of religious opinion. These ages, therefore, had their various "schools of thought."

The most prominent feature of this awakened, religious, and scientific thought throughout Europe was the endeavour to give a rational exposition of the doctrines of the Faith, and to organize them into a scientific system; it pervaded more or less all the other schools of thought of these ages. It will be enough to mention here the two great representatives of the school. Peter Lombard, in the latter part of the twelfth century, wrote "Quatuor Libri Sententiarum" (Four Books of Sentences), in which he arranged under their various heads the opinions of some of the older teachers, especially Augustine and Gregory the Great,[134] and of the newer teachers, and sought to reconcile them by accurate distinctions into a body of doctrine; he gathered together in compact brevity so rich a store of matter, and treated it with so much sobriety and moderation, that his work became a standard manual, adopted by the most distinguished teachers, who were content to teach and write commentaries on the "Sentences." "England alone is said to have produced no less than one hundred and sixty-four writers, who ill.u.s.trated this famous text-book."

The English Franciscan friar, Alexander of Hales (died 1245), was among the most important representatives of the scholastic theology. The greatest master of the school, however, was Thomas Aquinas, an Italian Dominican friar, who wrote in the third quarter of the thirteenth century.

His "Summa Theologica" is the greatest work of its cla.s.s, and served as a text-book to the students of Europe throughout the subsequent ages.[135]

Another school--of which Hugh, Canon of St. Victor in Paris (died 1141), was an eminent leader--included frequently men of great intellectual power, and skilled in the scholastic theology of their time; but the bent of the school was towards spiritual contemplation and practical piety.

They drew their doctrines rather from the Bible itself and the older Church teachers; they dwelt on the Divine perfections and on the relations of the soul to G.o.d; their religion was of the affections rather than the intellect. The college of St. Victor was for a long period a centre of this school. Robert Pullein was an eminent representative of its teaching at Oxford. Richard the Hermit, of Hampole, popularized its teachings in the fourteenth century in numerous tractates written in English; and its influence is easily recognized in many of the religious works of that and the subsequent century. "The Imitation of Christ," by Thomas a Kempis, a good example of the school, is at this day the favourite devotional book of tens of thousands of our devout people.[136]

Other Englishmen, who were among the most famous of the learned men of Europe, were John Duns Scotus, a Franciscan friar, who, at the end of the thirteenth century, displayed a great genius for mathematical science; and Roger Bacon (died 1292), another Franciscan, who possessed an extraordinary genius for physical science, and Occham. These, and such-like, were the men who ruled the thought of the time, and their teachings were eagerly studied and reproduced in the cathedral and monastic schools, and imbibed and a.s.similated by the scholars; and their general principles at least tinctured the teaching of the parish priests in their town parishes and country villages.

The course of reading in the Schools was four years in grammar (_i.e._ Latin language and literature), rhetoric, and logic, before the student could be admitted a Bachelor; three years in science, viz. arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, before inception as a Master; seven years'

study before, as a Bachelor of Theology, he could lecture on the "Sentences;"[137] and, lastly, he must study the Bible for three years, and lecture on one of the Canonical Books, before he could take his degree as a Doctor of Theology.

Students went up to the universities at an early age (fourteen or fifteen), and they went in great numbers. In the thirteenth century there were three thousand of them at Oxford. At first they lodged where they pleased, and were under no special oversight and discipline; but soon the university required that every student should be under the care of a recognized tutor; and before long bishops and lay benefactors began to build hostelries or halls, and to provide stipends for students; and out of these arose the mediaeval colleges, which provided a home and discipline and tutors, and pecuniary help to poor students; Merton College, at Oxford, was the earliest, founded by Walter of Merton, Bishop of Rochester (1264). The friars, at an early date after their inst.i.tution, sent their more promising members to the universities; and they cultivated the study of theology, philosophy, and natural science with so much success that within a short time their teachers were famous in all the universities of Europe, and members of their orders were promoted to the highest offices in the Church. Among Archbishops of Canterbury, Richard of Kilwardby, a Dominican, was succeeded by John of Peckham, a Franciscan.

Students of all nations flocked to the most famous seats of learning.

Latin was the language in which all instruction was given, and was the _lingua franca_ of all who pretended to learning; the students from the same country formed themselves into national clubs for mutual society and protection. The phrase, "The Republic of Letters," in those days signified a more real cosmopolitanism than in our days, when men go to their national universities, and meet only their own countrymen there, and when even learned men have not the habit of colloquial Latin.

Our readers may remember Bishop Latimer's nave piece of autobiography in a sermon before the king, which affords us an example of the farmer who sent his clever son to the schools. "My father," he says, "was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath field.

He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the king's majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty n.o.bles, each, having brought them up in G.o.dliness and fear of G.o.d. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor; and all this he did of the said farm" ("Sermons," p. 101).

Besides the youths whose fathers could afford to "keep them to school" out of their own means, the system produced a great host of poor scholars, many of whom out of term-time returned to their homes and supported themselves by their labour; others, with or without a special licence permitting them, travelled round the country, alone or in groups, asking for contributions to help them to maintain themselves and complete their education. Longfellow's "Spanish Student" and "Hyperion" help their readers to realize the groups of students, some thoughtful and ambitious, some full of the gaiety of youth, wandering from town to castle, from monastery to manor house, asking alms with a laugh and jest; and the knight and his lady gladly gave them supper and a shakedown in the hall, for the sake of their hopeful youth; and the prior or rector gave them a donation and a kind wish, with a wistful recollection of his own bygone student days; and people of all cla.s.ses gave a trifle, for it was a recognized act of piety to help poor scholars.

There are survivals to our own day. The clever Irish boys who used to be picked out by their priests and sent to St. Omer's, where they were made into scholars and Irish-French gentlemen--a charming type--some of whom rose to high station in their church, is a thing of the recent past. In Scotland, the schoolmaster is still on the outlook for those among his peasant laddies who possess the natural qualities of a scholar; and the minister is ready to give them the higher teaching where the dominie halts; and not only the parents are filled with ambition that the boy should succeed, but the whole village is proud of the honour reflected upon his birthplace.

Among this crowd of ambitious youths of all cla.s.ses there were sure to be some whose career would be wrecked, by failure in intelligence, industry, and character, and these formed a rather numerous cla.s.s of sham scholars and worthless clerics of whom we get glimpses from time to time.

In the Norwich Corporation records of 1521, is a copy of the examination of Sir William Green, in whose sketch of his own life we have a curiously detailed relation of the way in which many a poor man's son became a scholar and a priest. He was the son of a labouring man, Stephen-at-Grene, at Wantlet, in Lincolns.h.i.+re, and learned grammar for two years at the village school, and then went to day labour with his father. Afterwards he removed to Boston, where he lived with his aunt, labouring for his living and going to school as he had opportunity. Being evidently a clerkly lad, he was admitted to minor orders, up to that of acolyte, by "Friar Graunt," who was a suffragan bishop in the diocese of Lincoln. After that, he went to Cambridge, where he maintained himself partly by his labour, partly on alms, and availed himself of the opportunities of learning which the university afforded. At length he found an opportunity of going to Rome with two monks of Whalley Abbey, probably as one of their attendants; and there he endeavoured to obtain the order of priesthood, which seems to have been bestowed rather indiscriminately at Rome, and without a t.i.tle; but in this he was unsuccessful. On his return to England, he was for a short time thrown again on his labour for his living; but, going to Cambridge, he obtained from the vice-chancellor, Mr. Coney, a licence under seal to collect subscriptions for one year towards an exhibition, to enable him to complete his education and take his degree. Had he obtained money enough, completed his education, and obtained ordination in due course, it would have finished the story of a poor scholar in the regular way; but he fell into bad hands, forged a new poor scholar's letter, using the seal of the old letter, then letters of orders with a forged seal, and then went about begging alms as a dest.i.tute priest;[138] and we find him in the hands of the magistrates of Norwich under the charge of being a spy.

In the register of Lincoln diocese, in 1457, we find a record of one Hugh Bernewell, an Irishman, who went about pretending to be a priest, and undertaking to make a pilgrimage to Rome, and say prayers at the _Scala Cli_, for any who would pay him. He was found to be an impostor, and was put in the pillory.[139]

The next step in the career of the parish priest was his ordination. We have seen that he might receive the minor orders with little difficulty while still a youth pursuing his studies; but when it came to the sacred orders, he had to obtain a "t.i.tle," _i.e._ a definite place in which to exercise his ministry, and a competent maintenance to prevent the disgrace which pauper clergymen would bring upon the Church. The bishop who ordained a man without a t.i.tle was liable to maintain him out of his own purse, and there are instances of the enforcement of the liability. A curious instance of it is recorded in the Register of Archbishop Winchelsea of Canterbury, 1297, in a decree that the executors of a bishop, who had ordained a priest without t.i.tle, should provide for his maintenance when afterwards he became, without his own fault, mutilated so that he could no longer fulfil the office of priest.

But a t.i.tle was not always a cure of souls; any kind of ecclesiastical benefice which afforded a prospect of maintenance was sufficient; for example, members.h.i.+p of a convent or a hermitage. No doubt there were many young men of good families who desired ordination, not with a view to cure of souls, but with a view to being capable of holding ecclesiastical benefices as the rewards of the career which they proposed to pursue in the civil service of the Crown, or of great men. This partly accounts for the ordinations _ad t.i.tulum patrimonii sui quo respondet se esse contentum_ which are not uncommonly found in the Episcopal Registers, and the similar ones _ad t.i.tulum_, of lands and of a ville of five marks of annual rent, and of sixty s.h.i.+llings of annual pension, and the like.[140]

A great many poor men's sons also got little pensions as t.i.tles, and then took chantry priest's places.

The Rules of Examination for Orders were precise and the same in all dioceses. The number of men ordained was very large, and went on rapidly increasing through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; for there were four Orders to be ordained, Acolytes, Sub-deacons, Deacons, and Priests; not only the parishes had to be supplied, but a proportion of the inhabitants of religious houses were also ordained by the bishop on the presentation of the abbot, the candidate's position in the house being a sufficient t.i.tle.[141] In these ordinations there were frequent dispensations from canonical obstacles; servile condition, illegitimate birth, personal blemish,[142] and insufficient learning.

Some of the newly-ordained were at once inst.i.tuted to benefices, and licence of non-residence was given to a large proportion of the new rectors, that they might go to school or university to acquire the learning which they did not yet possess.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ORDINATION OF A DEACON. FROM A PRINTED PONTIFICAL (471 f.

2), A.D. 1520.]

In Bishop Langton's "Lichfield Registers" we find, in the single month of February, 1300, licences were given on inst.i.tution for one year's study, to Alexander de Verdon, Rector of Biddulph, Roger BaG.o.d, Rector of Alvechurch, Nicholas de Aylesbury, Rector of Pattingham, Roger Fitzherbert, Rector of Norbury, and Richard Birchal, Vicar of Tattenhill.

In the same month Richard Touchet, Rector of Middlewick, and Simon Touchet, of Mackworth, were sent to college for two years, and Walter de Fordinghay, Rector of Mackworth, for three years. In 1309, William de Draco, a youth of fifteen, was, at the Pope's instance, licensed to hold a benefice, and Conrad Homerschilt, a German, Rector of Filingley, got five years' leave of studious absence.[143]

We will a.s.sume that the typical parish priest--whose parentage and education at school and university we have seen, and whose fortunes we are following--pa.s.sed with credit the bishop's examination, was ordained without having need to put in a dispensation for canonical impediments, was inst.i.tuted by the bishop without any wish for licence of non-residence, then went off to his living, and was inducted into possession of his church by the archdeacon, with a solemn sense of the responsibilities he undertook, and an earnest desire to fulfil his duty.

It will be convenient to us here to divide our study of his life in the parish under several headings: his house and furniture; dress and daily life; and his duties as a parish priest.

CHAPTER X.