THE PARISH PRIEST--HIS BIRTH AND EDUCATION.
The early Saxon bishops were very often men of royal and noble families.
The religious houses, which were the centres of evangelization in the
early missionary phase of the history, were often founded by royal and
noble persons, who were not seldom themselves the first abbots and
abbesses, and handed down their houses and offices as hereditary
possessions. The parish churches were founded by the lords of the land,
who made the advowson appendant to the manor, and very usually brought up
a younger son to be the spiritual rector of the family estate. The natural
result of all this would be that a large proportion of the Saxon clergy
would be men of good family; not by any means exclusively, for we have
seen that even slaves[121] were sometimes admitted to Holy Orders, and we
have read[122] a kindly warning to priests of noble birth not to despise
their brethren of humbler origin; and the law assigned to every
priest--_qua_ priest--the rank of thane (p. 77).
We know that the founders of the English churches established schools, and
finding their converts apt pupils, soon raised up a learned native clergy.
The young men intended for the pastoral office were taught the learning
and trained in the ascetic discipline of these monastic schools.[123]
The natural result would be that the Saxon clergy would not only be
generally of good birth and breeding, but also religious, learned, and
capable men; the natural spiritual rulers, teachers, and protectors of the
population of freemen, villeins, and serfs who peopled the estate of which
the civil lord and ruler was often the rector’s father or brother.
The Norman Conquest introduced confusion for a time into both monasteries
and parishes. Norman abbots intruded into the religious houses, sometimes
quarrelled with the Saxon monks, and the first inhabitants of the
newly-founded monasteries were usually imported from abroad; as the
rectories fell vacant, they would be filled with the sons of the new
Norman lords of manors, and there could be little sympathy between the
Norman rector and the Saxon flock. But things soon settled down upon a new
course. In a very few generations Normans and Saxons amalgamated. The old
monasteries, revived and reformed, and the new ones added to them, were
filled with zealous English communities; and in the parishes an English
lord of the manor and an English rector ruled an English people. With the
thirteenth century we begin a new period of parish history, continuing
down to the sixteenth century, and extending all over the country, of
which the general features are very uniform; so that it is only necessary
occasionally to point out new institutions and phases of character.
* * * * *
Perhaps the most striking social feature of these centuries is the way in
which the Church opened up a career to all ranks and classes 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 classes supplied a great number of the clergy who filled the
offices of parish chaplain (= assistant-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
class 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 glæbe_, 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 Warwickshire, we get these
illustrations 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 God 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 nobly 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 “ignoble and degenerate offspring” in the liberal arts.
The author of the “Vision of Piers Plowman” gives utterance to the same
illiberal prejudices as the noble colleagues of Cranmer. He thinks that
“Bondmen and beggars’ children belong to labour, and should serve lords’
sons, and lords’ sons should serve God, 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 classes 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 passed 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 classes 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-à-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 illustrious 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 illustrated 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 class, 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 God; 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 à 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 assimilated 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 mediæval 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 institution, 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 naïve 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
nobles, each, having brought them up in godliness and fear of God. 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 classes 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 classes there were sure to be
some whose career would be wrecked, by failure in intelligence, industry,
and character, and these formed a rather numerous class 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 Lincolnshire, 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 title; 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 destitute
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
Cœli_, 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 “title,” _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 title 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 title, 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 title was not always a cure of souls; any kind of ecclesiastical
benefice which afforded a prospect of maintenance was sufficient; for
example, membership 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 titulum patrimonii sui quo respondet se esse
contentum_ which are not uncommonly found in the Episcopal Registers, and
the similar ones _ad titulum_, of lands and of a ville of five marks of
annual rent, and of sixty shillings of annual pension, and the like.[140]
A great many poor men’s sons also got little pensions as titles, 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 title.[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 instituted 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.
[Illustration: 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 institution for one year’s
study, to Alexander de Verdon, Rector of Biddulph, Roger Bagod, 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 assume that the typical parish priest--whose parentage and
education at school and university we have seen, and whose fortunes we are
following--passed with credit the bishop’s examination, was ordained
without having need to put in a dispensation for canonical impediments,
was instituted 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.