Clerks
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.
[Illustration: _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.
In the course of years there grew up, side by side, two different
set of courts of justice, the Church Courts and the King's Courts,
which were each guided by different laws. The laws which ruled the
Church Courts were much more merciful than those which ruled the
civil or King's Courts. Death was the punishment for almost every
offence tried in the King's Courts and in the Manor Courts; but in
the Church Courts the punishments were much less severe, and the
culprit had a much better chance of "turning over a new leaf".
If a man was brought before the King's Court charged with a crime,
he could call for a book. If he could read a few sentences, that
was taken to show that he was a clerk, and he could claim to be
tried by the Church Court. That is, he could claim "benefit of
clergy".
You can readily see that such a state of things, however good it
may have been at the first, was dreadfully abused in the course
of time. What at first had been merciful and just became in time
mischievous and dangerous. The great struggle between King Henry II
and Archbishop Thomas à Becket had to do with the power of these
two sets of courts, the King's Courts and the Church Courts--it had
to do with government, _not_ with religion and religious matters.
Clerks, or the clergy, were drawn from all classes of society, from
the royal family down to the serfs on the manors. In fact, before
the time of the Black Death, the only way in which a serf could
become a freeman was by buying his freedom or by becoming a clerk.
A serf who wanted his son to rise to a better position than his
own would try to get him made a clerk; for the moment he became a
clerk he was a free man. But to attain his purpose the serf must
first have the permission of his master or overlord. All overlords
were not tyrants by any means. The serf might do his master a good
turn--save his life, for instance--and in return his master would
set him free, or allow his son to be taught by the priest and
ordained; or he might let him join a college or monastery.
Many and many a priest, clerk, or monk rose from being a serf or a
villein in this way; so many, in fact, that a writer in the twelfth
century complains that villeins were attempting "to educate their
ignoble offspring". Later still, Piers Plowman complains that
"bondsmen's bairns could be made bishops".
There was a very sharp line of division between clerks and those
who were not clerks, and the privileges which clerks had, led to
much squabbling and many disorders.
Kings and nobles employed clerks on their business, for the simple
reason that they were able men, and had some "book learning", and
so, in that way, were better educated than most of those who were
not clerks. From the clerks, too, were drawn the men whom we now
call lawyers. We have seen that there was a vast deal of writing to
be done in those days in connection with the towns and the manors.
Among these clerks were good men and bad men: some who loved
learning for its own sake; some who found that it paid better than
anything else; and others who misused their privileges, did much
evil, and brought the name of "clerk" into sad disgrace.
[Illustration: _Writing before the Norman Conquest. From a
charter of Cnut (1018) now in the British Museum_]