71. That monk, of savage form and face. Scott says here: "The state of
religion in the middle ages afforded considerable facilities for those
whose mode of life excluded them from regular worship, to secure,
nevertheless, the ghostly assistance of confessors, perfectly willing
to adapt the nature of their doctrine to the necessities and peculiar
circumstances of their flock. Robin Hood, it is well known, had his
celebrated domestic chaplain Friar Tuck. And that same curtal friar was
probably matched in manners and appearance by the ghostly fathers of
the Tynedale robbers, who are thus described in an excommunication
fulminated against their patrons by Richard Fox, Bishop of Durham,
tempore Henrici VIII.: 'We have further understood, that there are many
chaplains in the said territories of Tynedale and Redesdale, who are
public and open maintainers of concubinage, irregular, suspended,
excommunicated, and interdicted persons, and withal so utterly ignorant
of letters, that it has been found by those who objected this to them,
that there were some who, having celebrated mass for ten years, were
still unable to read the sacramental service. We have also understood
there are persons among them who, although not ordained, do take upon
them the offices of priesthood, and, in contempt of God, celebrate the
divine and sacred rites, and administer the sacraments, not only
in sacred and dedicated places, but in those which are prophane and
interdicted, and most wretchedly ruinous, they themselves being attired
in ragged, torn, and most filthy vestments, altogether unfit to be used
in divine, or even in temporal offices. The which said chaplains do
administer sacraments and sacramental rites to the aforesaid manifest
and infamous thieves, robbers, depredators, receivers of stolen goods,
and plunderers, and that without restitution, or intention to restore,
as evinced by the act; and do also openly admit them to the rites of
ecclesiastical sepulchre, without exacting security for restitution,
although they are prohibited from doing so by the sacred canons, as well
as by the institutes of the saints and fathers. All which infers the
heavy peril of their own souls, and is a pernicious example to the other
believers in Christ, as well as no slight, but an aggravated injury,
to the numbers despoiled and plundered of their goods, gear, herds, and
chattels.'"