Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England Part 35

Wherefore, as I am now called back frome myne inordinate doinges by this correction, with my coste and shame, so I beseche yow all to be witnesses with me that I am sory frome the verrey bottome of my harte for this and my other like offences against G.o.d, the Quene's majestie, and the said Bertram Mydforde; promysinge before G.o.d and you here present, that I fully intende to amende my outerageous tonge and wilfull behaviour, as maye please Almightie G.o.d, satisfye the Quene's lawes, and towrne to yur good example and myne owne sowle's health; for the obteyninge and performinge thereof I humbly beseche yow all, with me and for me, to pray unto G.o.d as our Saviour Jesus Xt. himself, beinge on earth, taught us, sayinge 'Our Father,' etc. A.D.

1570."[627]

A suit was begun in 1458 against John Andrew of Cobham and Margery Allyn, late of Shorne, for having clandestinely married while a matrimonial cause was pending between her and Richard c.o.ke. They were sentenced, December 20, to be whipped "after the manner of penitents"

once in Rochester market and thrice round their parish church. Walter Crepehogg, who had promoted the marriage, was thought the worst offender, for besides _six_ whippings he was condemned to carry a torch worth 6_s._ 8_d._ to the altar of the cathedral, and to make a similar offering to St. Blaize at Bromley.[628]

Occasionally a contumacious person resisted the sentence. For example--

In 1315, Lady Plokenet [Plucknet] directed by will that she should be buried in Sherborne Church. Her son, Sir Alan, probably to save expense, buried her "in a less dignified place." The bishop sent him orders by the Rector of Dowlish Wake, who was the Rural Dean of Crewkerne, to obey his mother's request. Falling into a rage at this, the knight rushed on the dean, caught him by the throat, and choaked him by twisting his hood, and even caused him to bleed. The dean got away, and fled. At Haslebury, however, Sir Alan and his men caught him, and there the knight made him eat the bishop's letter, and chew and swallow the wax seals. For this he was excommunicated, but made due submission.[629]

In the "Proceedings of the Durham Court" we read that--

John Doffenby, being a person excommunicate, did come into Mitfourth Church in tyme of service, and being admonished to depart thrice, would not, but gave evil language, saying that he cared not for the commissary and his laws, nor for the curate, and bade them come who durst and carry him out of the church; whereupon the curate was driven to leave off service at the gospel. It does not appear what was the end of the case.

Agnes Hebburne, 1454, having been sentenced to do penance in _pannis lineis_, impudently pleaded that she had not a fit smock, and was not able to buy one; whereupon the judge ordered her to do her penance in a "tunica habens unam vestem vocatur le nap.r.o.n."

There are some pictorial ill.u.s.trations of the subject in the illuminated MSS. The scourging of Henry II. before the shrine of Becket is often portrayed. In the Omne Bonum (Royal, 6 Ed. VI., f. 218 v.) is a very curious picture of a priest giving the discipline to a penitent kneeling before him;[630] and at f. 443 (6 E. VII.), a man scourging himself on the bare back in his bedroom. In a Pontifical printed at Venice, 1520, f. 155, penitents in their shirts are kneeling before the bishop; a man kneeling to a priest who lays the rod of absolution on his shoulder, at 203 v., and Reconciliation of Penitents at the end of Lent, f. 177.

There are two sides to most questions, and what a man will say upon any question depends upon his point of view. What we are told of clergy and laity of those ages by courts of discipline which dealt exclusively with their peccadilloes, and by the satirists whose motive was the scourging of the peccators, gives us one side of the subject. n.o.body took the trouble to tell the obvious, uninteresting story of the ruck of parsons of respectable character who were doing their daily round of duty, Sunday and workaday, fairly well, except Chaucer, and he--great student of human life and manners that he was--while scourging with a whip of scorpions the faults of monks and friars, and pardoners and "sompnours," completes his gallery of ecclesiastical characters with the loveliest portrait of the typical parish priest.

The inquisitorial meddling of the courts of spiritual discipline, their pecuniary exactions and shameful penances, were by no means the least of the abuses which made men cry out for a reformation.

In connection with this system of discipline was the custom of p.r.o.nouncing a general sentence of excommunication in church several times a year which is mentioned by John Myrc (p. 238). We may add here that it was not at all uncommon to try to bring an unknown thief to make rest.i.tution by the threat of a sentence of excommunication; thus Bishop Thomas, in 1376, at the request of Philip de Nevile, directs all the clergy to give notice that some persons unknown have knowingly detained a very valuable hawk, and they are to restore it within ten days on pain of the greater excommunication.[631] Two years afterwards (1378), the same bishop excommunicates certain persons who have stolen some "merlions" from his forest of Wesdale, and destroyed their nests.[632] On the other hand, the old Saxon system of purgation of oath still continued, _e.g._ in 1458, William G.o.dthank, accused of theft, appeared in Gnosall Church, Lichfield, with eight of his neighbours, and standing before the altar he swore that he was innocent, and his neighbours that they believed him, whereupon the bishop threatened excommunication against any one who should in future slander him.[633]

Archbishop Peckham's third const.i.tution at Reading (1279) orders the General Excommunications to be explained to the people on the Sundays after every Rural Chapter, and the archdeacons to see that it is done.[634]

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.

The 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 superst.i.tions priests and people were generally degraded and vicious.

The truth lies somewhere between the two. We do not propose to enter into polemical discussion. Our business, as it seems to us, is to try to put ourselves into the midst of the people, to enter into their minds, to study their lives, and to represent as fairly as we can what manner of men priests and people were, what they believed, and how they lived.

We seem to see on the whole that there were two "schools of thought" in the Middle Ages. One consisted of learned men of a speculative turn of mind, who explained and developed ancient doctrines and practices into new and erroneous meanings; followed by a crowd of devout people who adopted their views, and sometimes degraded philosophical speculations and pious opinions, which they hardly understood, into gross misapprehensions and superst.i.tions. On the other hand, there were people of competent learning, who read the Scriptures and the ancient Fathers, and in substance adhered to their teaching; and with them remained a crowd of people whose Christian common sense kept them fairly free of extravagances. We must be careful in judging people who have been brought up in a faulty system. We must not take for granted that everybody believed in every error and in the conclusions logically involved in it, or approved of every superst.i.tious custom. On the contrary, the soul, like the stomach, seems to discriminate what it lives on, and to have a power of a.s.similating what is good, and rejecting more or less what is noxious. Why should we doubt that G.o.d watches over His people, and helps the ignorant, well-intentioned Christian man unconsciously to refuse the evil and choose the good?

If we look at the general character of the centuries we have been studying, there is no denying that there was a great deal which was good in them. The people in the twelfth century had a great zeal for religion of an ascetic type, and amidst the violence and oppression of the times there was a great deal of religious feeling of an exalted character, and many a saintly life. It was the great age of the Latin hymns.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Early English architecture. North-west transept of Beverley Minster.]

In the thirteenth century, the enthusiasm for the ascetic life had cooled down, having been to some extent disappointed; the monks were not so highly thought of, and the more sober type of religion represented by the bishop and secular clergy came to the front. It was a great century of intense vitality; the spirit of freedom was moving the middle cla.s.ses of the people, and the Church was in hearty sympathy with them. It was the age of organization of civil inst.i.tutions. Very few monasteries were built, but every cathedral was enlarged, and churches were rebuilt; there was never so active an architectural period. The new religious spirit of the age showed itself in that rare event, the introduction of a new style of architecture, bold engineering skill in its construction, with pointed arches soaring heavenwards, ornamentations of acanthus leaves just unfolding in the vigour of the spring-time of a new year.

In the fourteenth century, the history of the Lollard movement is enough to show the strong religious feeling of the people and its tendency towards sounder views of religion. The saying that, "Where you saw three people talking together, two of them were Lollards," was said by a Lollard, and may be an exaggeration; but there is no question that (while some went to extremes, as always in an age of great intellectual movement and strong feeling) the ma.s.s of the people was leavened by what there was--and there was much--that was true in the new ideas.[635]

It has been suggested by ingenious critics that Chaucer, being connected by marriage and sympathy with the leader of the party which favoured the opinion of the school of Wiclif, his famous description of "a poure parson of a town" is only the ideal of what a parish priest ought to be according to the view of that school. It may be maintained, on the other hand, that Chaucer's sketches of the clergy of all orders are conceived in a spirit of genial satire; and that if the parish priests had been generally worldly-minded and negligent of their duties, unclerical in attire and weapons, attendants on field-sports and haunters of taverns, the great artist would have put a man of that type among his inimitable gallery of contemporary character sketches. We have no fear of being mistaken when we take it that his "poure parson of a town" (which does not necessarily mean a town but quite possibly a village rector[636]) had many prototypes among the parochial clergy of the fourteenth century.

A good man there was of religioun, That was a poure parson of a toun; But riche was of holy thought and werk.

He was also a lerned man, a clerk, That Christe's Gospel treweley would preche.

His parishens devoutly wolde he teche.

Benigne he was, and wonder diligent, And in adversity ful patient; And such he was y proved often sithes, Ful loth were he to cursen for his t.i.thes, But rather would he given, out of doubte, Unto his poure parishens about, Of his offering, and eke of his substance.

He could in litel thing have suffisance.

Wide was his parish, and houses fer asunder, But he ne left nought, for no rain ne thunder, In siknesse and in mischief to visite The farthest in his parish much and lite, Upon his fete, and in his hand a staff.

This n.o.ble example to his sheep he gaf, That first he wrought and afterward he taught Out of the gospel he the wordes caught, And this figure he added yet thereto, That if gold ruste what should iron do, For if a priest be foul on whom we trust, No wonder is a leude man to rust; And shame it is if that a priest take kepe, To see a filthy shepherd and clene shepe.

Well ought a priest example for to give By his clenenesse how his shepe shulde live.

He sette not his benefice to hire, And left his shepe acc.u.mbered in the mire, And ran unto London unto Saint Poule's To seeken him a chanterie for souls, Or with a brotherhede to be withold, But dwelt at home and kepte well his fold, So that the wolfe made him not miscarry.

He was a shepherd and no mercenarie, And though he holy were and virtuous, He was to sinful men not despitous, Ne of his speche dangerous ne digne,[637]

But in his teaching discrete and benigne.

To drawen folk to heaven with fairenesse By good ensample was his businesse.

But if it were any persone obstinat, What so he were of highe or low estate, Him wolde he snibben[638] sharply for the nones.

A better priest I trow nowhere non is.

He waited after no pomp ne reverence, Ne maked him no spiced[639] conscience, But Christes love and His apostles twelve, He taught, but first he followed it himselve.

[Ill.u.s.tration: King's College Chapel, Cambridge, 15th century.]

The fifteenth century is generally believed to have been especially religiously dead. There are two ways of looking at it; we may talk, not without some reason, of the stagnation of the f.a.g end of mediaevalism, of the wealth and worldliness and neglect of the prelates, of the superst.i.tion of the people, and so forth; but one fact, which still exists all over the country, is enough by itself to work instant conviction that there is another side to the question--the church building of the century.

Our forefathers in the fifteenth century had enough of life and originality to develop here in England a new variety of Gothic art distinctly different from the development of the art on the Continent of Europe; a reaction against the luxuriant beauty of the Decorated; with a masculine strength in its lines, and a practical modification of plan and elevation so as to obtain s.p.a.cious, lofty interiors. Take its grand towers as a measure of its artistic power; call to mind the use of painted windows as the great means of coloured decoration; study the elaboration and richness of the roofs and chancel screens of Norfolk and Devon.

Calculate the immense quant.i.ty of church architecture and art executed in the fifteenth century, not only in monasteries and cathedrals, but in parish churches; think of the magnificent parish churches of Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, and Somerset, and of the rising towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Remember that they were not commissioned and paid for by the parochial clergy, for we have shown that they had nothing to spare; not by the n.o.bility, for they were half ruined by the Wars of the Roses; but by the large minds of the rising middle cla.s.s, and out of the wealth which trade and commerce brought them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Magdalen College, Oxford, 15th century.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: St. Michael's, Coventry, 15th century.]

This one piece of evidence is enough to prove the existence of vigorous religious faith among the people. At the same time, kings and prelates were founding colleges and schools, _e.g._ Winchester and Eton, New and King's. Country gentlemen were founding chantries and supplying themselves with domestic chaplains, and the traders of the towns were founding gilds and services in order to obtain for themselves and those belonging to them additional means of grace and closer pastoral care. It is not possible to believe in the face of such facts that there was not a great deal of very earnest religion in the fifteenth century. Abuses and false doctrines and superst.i.tions there were in abundance, but the religious spirit of the fifteenth century was already striving earnestly for reform, and acc.u.mulating that force of public opinion which broke out in the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and compelled Rome itself, after frustrating the Councils of Constance and Basle, to make the reforms of the Council of Trent.

Contrast this with the three centuries which followed; with the cessation of all building of new churches and the neglect of the old ones, and the shameful condition of the services in many of them; with the absence of the extension of Church machinery to meet the needs of the increasing population; and it will be hard to believe that there was not much more of religious earnestness in the fifteenth century than in those which followed it. The _Italian relation of England_[640] says of the people of the later part of this century: "They all attend ma.s.s every day, and say many paternosters in public, the women carrying long rosaries in their hands, and any who can read taking the office of Our Lady with them, and, with some companion, reciting it in the church verse by verse in a low voice, after the manner of the religious. They always hear ma.s.s on Sunday in their parish church, and give liberal alms because they may not offer less than a piece of money whereof fourteen are equal to a gold ducat, nor do they omit any form inc.u.mbent upon good Christians."

APPENDIX I.

The history of the parish of Whalley in Lancashire affords an interesting ill.u.s.tration 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 rectory, together with the manor, descended from father to son. These facts suggest that the lord of the manor, in early days after the Conversion, turned his house into a semi-secular monastery such as those we have described (p. 35), retaining the headship of it for himself, and handing it down to his heirs; and that in course of time, instead of developing into a monastery of a stricter kind, it changed into the parochial type of rectory. From the earliest known time, and throughout the Saxon period, however, the reverend lords of the manor rejoiced in the t.i.tle of dean, the Bishop of Worcester having committed to them large ecclesiastical jurisdiction over this remote and inaccessible corner of his diocese.

After the Conquest, the lordship of this part of the country, including the Manor of Whalley, was given to Henry de Lacy, who laid claim to the advowson of the benefice of Whalley; but for a time the difficulty was got over by De Lacy presenting the hereditary claimant, De Lacy thus establishing a precedent of right of presentation, the hereditary claimant treating it as nothing more than a certificate that he was the rightful heir.

The names of the deans for several generations are given in a "Description of Blackburnshire," which was probably written by J. Lindlay, Abbot of Whalley (A.D. 1342-1377); they are Spartlingus, Lewlphus, Cutwulph, Cudwolphus, Henry the Elder, Robert, Henry the Younger, William, Geoffry the Elder, Geoffry the Younger, and Roger.

The decree of the Lateran Council in 1215 prohibited these hereditary successions to benefices, and Roger, the last dean, resigned the benefice and surrendered the advowson to the De Lacys, and "settled at the Ville of Tunlay as the progenitor of a flourishing family yet subsisting after a lapse of six centuries, legitimate descendants of the Deans of Whalley and Lords of Blackburnshire."[641] Thereupon De Lacy presented Peter de Cestria to the rectory,[642] and during his inc.u.mbency (in 1284) appropriated the rectory to the Monastery of Stanlaw.

Before this date--how long before is not known--there were already in the parish seven chapels of old foundation. Three of them--c.l.i.therhow, Calne, and Burnley--are named in a charter of the time of Henry I.; a fourth--Elvethan--is named in a charter of the time of Richard I.; the rest are not named till the grant of the advowson of H. de Lacy in 1284.

The probability is that the first three or four had, from time to time, been founded by the old Saxon deans, in the villages which sprang up in their extensive manor; the remainder, perhaps, at a later period between the Conquest and the last quarter of the thirteenth century. They were all endowed with glebe land of about thirty-five acres each.

At the next vacancy, the convent of Stanlaw entered upon its enjoyment of the Rectory of Whalley. How they served it is not known. In old times there is evidence that the dean had at least a chaplain and clerk to aid him in his duties. Probably the convent retained the staff of a.s.sistant clergy, whatever it might be, and added another in place of the rector.