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PARISH PRIESTS AND THEIR PEOPLE.
PARISH PRIESTS AND THEIR PEOPLE.
FROM THE XV. CENT. MS., EGERTON 2019, f. 142. PARISH PRIESTS AND THEIR PEOPLE IN THE MIDDLE AGES IN ENGLAND. BY THE REV. EDWARD L. CUTTS, D.D., AUTHOR OF “TURNING POINTS OF ENGLISH CHURCH HISTORY,” “A DICTIONARY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND,” “A HANDY BOOK OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND,” ETC. PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OE THE TRACT COMMITTEE. LONDON: SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C. 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. BRIGHTON: 129, NORTH STREET. New York : E &
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PREFACE.
PREFACE.
A great mass of material has of late years been brought within reach of the student, bearing upon the history of the religious life and customs of the English people during the period from their conversion, in the sixth and seventh centuries, down to the Reformation of the Church of England in the sixteenth century; but this material is still to be found only in great libraries, and is therefore hardly within reach of the general reader. The following chapters contain the results of some study o
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DESCRIPTION OF PLATES.
DESCRIPTION OF PLATES.
The illustration taken from a French MS. of the middle of the fifteenth century [Egerton 2019, f. 142, British Museum] will reward a careful study. Begin with the two pictures introduced into the broad ornamental border at the bottom of the page. On the left are a pope, an emperor, a king, and queen; on the right Death, on a black horse, hurling his dart at them. Go on to the initial D of the Psalm Dilexi quoniam exaudiet Dominus vocem : “I am well pleased that the Lord hath heard the voice of m
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CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER I.
OUR HEATHEN FOREFATHERS. W hen we have the pleasure of taking our Colonial visitors on railway journeys across the length and breadth of England, and they see cornfields, meadows, pastures, copses, succeed one another for mile after mile, with frequent villages and country houses, what seems especially to strike and delight them is the thoroughness and finish of the cultivation; England seems to them, they say, like a succession of gardens, or, rather, like one great garden. This is the result,
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CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER II.
THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH. T he history of the conversion of our heathen forefathers has happily been told so often in recent times that it is not necessary to repeat it here. It is sufficient for our purpose to recall to mind how when Augustine and his Italian company came to Kent, they addressed themselves to King Ethelbert, who had married a Christian princess of the House of Clovis, and were permitted by him to settle and preach in his kingdom; how King Oswald, on his recovery of his anc
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CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER III.
THE MONASTIC PHASE OF THE CHURCH. W e have seen how the bishops who introduced the Christian Faith into the heptarchic kingdoms established themselves and their clergy as religious communities, on the lands, and with the means which the kings gave them, built their churches and schools, and made them the centres of their evangelizing work. The next stage in the work was the multiplication of similar centres. The princes and ealdormen who were in subordinate authority over subdivisions of a kingd
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CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER IV.
DIOCESAN AND PAROCHIAL ORGANIZATION. T he English Conversion forms a remarkable chapter in the general history of Christian missions; the piety, simplicity, zeal, and unselfishness of the missionaries are beyond praise; not less remarkable is the earnestness with which the English embraced the new faith and the civilization which came together with it. The fact bears witness to the intellectual and moral qualities of the people that in the very first generation of converts there were men of lear
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CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER V.
THE SAXON CLERGY. T he sources from which we obtain the fullest details of the religious life of the Saxon priests and people are the laws of their kings and the canons of their synods; and perhaps the most convenient way of presenting the information which these contain will be partly to give a series of quotations from them in chronological order, with such explanations as may seem necessary; partly to group them according to their subject; using one method or the other as may seem best to ser
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CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VI.
THE NORMAN CONQUEST. O ne immediate result of the Norman conquest was that Archbishop Stigand and several other bishops and abbots were ejected, and foreign ecclesiastics put in their place. It is not necessary to suppose that William acted solely on the desire to put men devoted to his interests into these positions of power and influence, for Edward the Confessor had already appointed some foreign bishops with the object of raising the tone of learning and religion in the English Church; and a
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CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VII.
THE FOUNDATION OF VICARAGES. T he Norman founders of monasteries not only gave to them lands and moneys, but also the parish churches, of which they had the advowson. It can hardly be said that in so doing they gave what was not theirs to give, for the idea was still prominent in men’s minds that the church which a landlord or his antecessor had built for himself and his people was, in a sense, his church, and that he was at liberty (as he is to this day) to give his rights in it to some one els
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CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER VIII.
PAROCHIAL CHAPELS. A t a rather early period, so the evidence leads us to conclude, all the great Saxon landowners had founded a religious house or a rectory on their estates, and these had, first by custom and then by legal recognition of the custom, obtained certain rights; on one hand, the sole right of spiritual ministration and pastoral jurisdiction among the people on those estates; and, on the other hand, to certain payments from them. Many of these estates were very large in area, embrac
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CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER IX.
THE PARISH PRIEST—HIS BIRTH AND EDUCATION. T he 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
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CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER X.
PARSONAGE HOUSES. T here is no reason to suppose that the houses of the parochial clergy differed from those of lay people of corresponding income and social position, except in the one circumstance that they sometimes had to provide for the hospitality to travellers to which we will give special consideration hereafter. The house of a rector, from Saxon times downwards, would be very like that of a lay lord of a small estate, but it is very difficult for us, with our ideas of absolutely necessa
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CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XI.
FURNITURE AND DRESS. T here was a continual fight going on all through the Middle Ages between the rulers of the Church and the rest of their brethren on the subject of the ordinary costume of the clergy. It seems to have been a part of the Hildebrandine plan of making the secular clergy a kind of semi-monastic order. Wherever there is a strong canon on enforcing celibacy, there we are sure to find another canon enjoining a well-marked tonsure, and forbidding long hair, and worldly fashions of d
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CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XII.
FABRIC AND FURNITURE OF CHURCHES, AND OFFICIAL COSTUME OF PRIESTS. I t is not necessary to describe the churches of mediæval England, for happily they still exist of all periods and styles, from the rude Saxon church built of split oak or chestnut trunks, at Greenstead, in Essex, down to the noble perpendicular churches of the close of the fifteenth century. We may, however, make two remarks upon them. First, the comparative magnitude and sublimity of the churches was far greater in the times wh
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CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE PUBLIC SERVICES IN CHURCH. T he public services on Sunday in a parish church were Matins, Mass, and Evensong. We do not propose more than to take an outside view of them; the reader who cares to do so may without difficulty obtain a missal and breviary, and study their contents. We may, however, make two remarks bearing upon the important general question of the popular religion of these Middle Ages. The first is that there is a widespread error on the subject of the “Mass” in the minds of t
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CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XIV.
PREACHING AND TEACHING. T here is a chain of evidences that the rulers of the Church not only enjoined the diligent teaching of the people by their parish priests in sermon [208] and otherwise, but also gave the clergy the assistance of manuals of teaching and sermon helps; and, further, took pains at their visitations to ascertain that the duty was efficiently performed. So early as the beginning of the eighth century, Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne, published a poem in four hundred and fifty-eig
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CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XV.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR PARISH PRIESTS. A flood of light is thrown upon the subject of a priest’s duties in his parish by the handbooks which seem to have been as common in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as they are in the nineteenth; instructing, advising, exhorting the clergy as to their duties, and the best way of fulfilling them. The Early English Text Society has printed one of these entitled, “Instructions for Parish Priests,” written by John Myrk, a canon of Lilleshall, in Shropshire, n
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CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVI.
POPULAR RELIGION. I n Saxon times, the Creed, Lord’s Prayer, and Ten Commandments were taught to the people in their own tongue, sometimes in metrical paraphrases, that they might the more easily be remembered, and every parent was required to teach them to his children. A canon of the Synod of Clovesho, in 747, required the priest to explain everything in the Divine service to the people, and the Gospel for the day was read to them in the vernacular. The poem of Cædmon, which paraphrased large
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CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY. T he enforcement of celibacy upon the clergy was an important feature in the plan of the Hildebrandine reformers of the eleventh century. The idea which inspired the enthusiasm of the foremost Churchmen of the time was, no doubt, a grand one. It was to bring the national churches into practical co-operation by a world-wide ecclesiastical organization, and to place the spiritual authority of the whole Church in the hand of one man, in order to control the world-power o
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CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
VISITATION ARTICLES AND RETURNS. T he visitation of the parishes by the Ordinary—the ecclesiastical person who exercised spiritual jurisdiction over them [278] —was an important feature of ecclesiastical administration. [279] We have seen that a canon of the famous Council of Clovesho, in 747, directed bishops to make an annual visitation of their dioceses. As time went on the duty, burdensome alike to the bishops and clergy, fell into disuse, and seems to have been resumed again in the twelfth
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CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XIX.
PROVISION FOR OLD AGE. W e have followed our parish priest through various phases of his life and work; there remains one more—before that last one through which all priests and people must pass—on which the records throw a considerable amount of light. Parish priests grow old—sometimes old and infirm and incapable of fulfilling the duties of their position. What to do with them, in fairness to them and in fairness to the parishioners, is a problem which perplexes us at this moment. Then, as now
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CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XX.
THE PARISH CLERK. T he parish clerk seems to have existed about as long as the parish priest, if we are right in assuming that the man of sober life whom the parish priest was required by the “canons of King Edgar” to bring with him to the diocesan synods (see p. 67) was the prototype of that useful official. At least, from a very early time every parish had its clerk to attend upon the priest in his office, and to perform a number of useful services on behalf of the parishioners. An Injunction
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CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXI.
CUSTOMS. I t remains to mention a great variety of observances and customs, some of them superstitious, some innocent enough, many of them picturesque and poetical and giving colour and variety to the popular religious life. It would need another volume as large as this to do justice to the subject which we find ourselves compelled to deal with in a single chapter. The right of Sanctuary, the immunity from violence even of the criminal who had put himself under the protection of present Deity, w
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CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXII.
ABUSES. E ven a book like this, which professes to deal with the humbler details of parochial life, rather than with the greater matters of ecclesiastical history, would be defective if it failed to take some note of the administrative abuses against which all Europe complained for centuries, and tried in vain to get them amended in the three great Councils at Pisa, Constance, and Basle. We shall treat of them very briefly, and chiefly in their relation to our special subject. It was soon found
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CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE CATHEDRAL. I n order to give a complete view of the position and work of the parochial clergy in town and country, it is necessary to indicate, however briefly, both their connection with the cathedral and their relations with the monasteries. In this chapter we attempt the former subject; the latter in a following chapter. We must glance back at our history and recall the time when the cathedral was the mother church of the diocese, and the bishop and his clergy lived together as one family
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CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXIV.
MONKS AND FRIARS. W e have only to deal here with the relations of the religious houses with the clergy, and their influence upon the general religious life of clergy and people. First of all, the monasteries kept before the minds both of parish priests and of their people the ideal of an unambitious, self-denying, studious, meditative, religious life. No doubt many of the monks and nuns fell short of their own ideal, and there were occasional scandals; we find notices in the registers of the bi
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CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE “TAXATIO” OF POPE NICHOLAS IV. I n the thirteenth century the popes assumed the right, as feudal lords over the Church, to demand from every church benefice a fine of its first year’s income from every new incumbent, and an annual tax of one-tenth of its income. The Saxon kings had made the Church lands exempt from state imposts; [416] but now kings very naturally began to think that the necessities of the State had as good a claim as those of the pope; and there ensued a certain amount of f
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CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE “VALOR ECCLESIASTICUS” OF HENRY VIII. I t is convenient to take into consideration here another survey of the Church which was taken about two centuries later. When Crown, Parliament, and Church, in the sixteenth century, determined to throw off the patriarchal supremacy of Rome, for which its monstrous pecuniary exactions in one shape and another was one prominent motive, the clergy no doubt fondly expected that they would get rid for ever of the burden of first-fruits and tenths, but found
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CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVII.
DOMESTIC CHAPELS. T he Byzantine emperors first set up a private chapel in their houses; kings followed their example, and the nobles followed the example of their kings; and there was a danger of the clergy of these chapels, supported by their lords, making themselves independent of the oversight of the bishops, and of the worship of the rich being separated from the worship of the poor. [446] In 692, the second Trullan Council decreed that no clergyman should perform the rite of baptism or cel
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CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE CHANTRY. T he characteristic feature of the Church work of the seventh century was the conversion of the Teutonic heathen people who had conquered the eastern half of England, and the foundation of a bishopric in every one of the heptarchic kingdoms; of the eighth century, the multiplication of monastic centres of evangelization; of that and the succeeding centuries the spread of the parochial system of a priest for each manor; of the twelfth century, the foundation of monasteries; of the th
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CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXIX.
GILDS. T he voluntary societies or fraternities called “gilds,” which were numerous all over Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, were established for mutual help and comfort in the various exigencies of life—in sickness, old age, poverty (if not the result of misconduct), in wrongful imprisonment, in losses by fire, water, or shipwreck. [560] So far it was a benefit club. But the gild had always a religious basis. It usually put itself under the name and protection of the Holy Trinity or of som
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CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE MEDIÆVAL TOWNS. A typical mediæval town must have been wonderfully picturesque. As the traveller came in sight of it at a little distance its grey embattled walls, rising sheer out of the surrounding green meadows, were diversified in elevation and sky-line by projecting wall towers; and numerous spires and towers of churches appeared over the walls. [572] As he rode nearer, the great gate tower, with its outwork the barbican, formed a picturesque architectural group, and spoke of the streng
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CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXI.
DISCIPLINE. T he average Englishman of the present day has hardly an idea of what is meant by ecclesiastical discipline, and is quite ignorant of the large part which it played in the practical religious life of people in ancient times. Yet its principles are laid down in the New Testament; the right and duty of the Church to hear and determine causes between Christian men is contained in our Lord’s command, “If thy brother trespass against thee ... tell it to the Church; and if he neglect to he
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CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXII.
RELIGIOUS OPINIONS. T he subject of the religious condition of the parish priests and their people in the Middle Ages—their belief and life—brings us into a polemical atmosphere. There are some admirers of those times who look upon them as “the Ages of Faith;” there are others who think that in those times of false doctrines and manifold superstitions priests and people were generally degraded and vicious. The truth lies somewhere between the two. We do not propose to enter into polemical discus
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APPENDIX I.
APPENDIX I.
The history of the parish of Whalley in Lancashire affords an interesting illustration of the growth of parochial organization. The original parish was a vast tract of wild hilly country, fifty miles long, covering two hundred superficial miles, in the north-west corner of Lancashire, chiefly forest and moor, with fertile pastures in the broad valleys of the Ribble, the Hodder, the Calder, and their tributaries. The Saxon rectors were also lords of the manor; they were married men, and the recto
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APPENDIX II.
APPENDIX II.
We have in the case of two Rural Deaneries, by way of sample, tabulated the benefices as entered in the “Taxatio” and the “Valor” with one another and with the modern Clergy List; with a few notes upon them. DIOCESE OF LONDON.—DEANERY OF BERDESTAPLE. DIOCESE OF CANTERBURY. DEANERY OF BRIGG. ...
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APPENDIX III.
APPENDIX III.
The illustrations which we have been able to give of our subject from the pictures in Mediæval MSS. are only a handful selected out of a very great number. It may be useful to some students to have references to the MSS. in the British Museum, where other illustrations of special interest may be found. The most useful for illustrations of ecclesiastical rites, and incidentally for the vestments of all orders of the clergy, and for instrumenta , are the Pontificals; e.g. — The Pontifical of Landu
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