Edward Lewes Cutts

“ So, in 1468, Richard Hammerton endowed a chantry in the chapel of Our Lady and St. Anne, in the church of Long Preston, co. York, “that the incumbent should pray for the soul of the founder, help to perform divine service in the choir in time of necessity, teach a grammar and song school to the children of the parish, make a special obit yearly for the soul of the founder, distribute at the same time six shillings to the poor in bread, and make a sermon by himself or deputy once a year.” ”

“ It was obvious to reply to the supposed advantages of a priesthood disentangled from worldly anxieties, that, on the contrary, it was desirable for the pastors in immediate habitual intercourse with the people to be men who had property and families, because then they could deal with men on the ground of common interests and sympathies; and that to impose compulsory celibacy on the secular clergy was a measure full of the gravest dangers. ”

“ The hereditary succession of the semi-secular Saxon monasteries afforded a venerable precedent for doing so. The tendency of the feudal system was to make all offices hereditary, and the practice was growing up of making church benefices hereditary, and treating them like lay fiefs; e.g. dividing them between two or more sons, as if they were an ordinary estate; demanding a fine from a new rector as the lord of the manor did from a new tenant; making the condition that the presentee should give up this or that ancient possession of the benefice, or should pay an annual pension to the patron. ”

“ The laws of Wihtred of Kent make the word of a king or a bishop incontrovertible without an oath; a priest, like a king’s thane, is to clear himself with his own oath at the altar; he is to stand before the altar in his vestments, and laying his hand upon the altar, to say, “Veritatem dico in Christo, non mentior;” [68] the superior of a monastery is to make oath like a priest; a clerk, like a “ceorlish man,” to make like oath at the altar, but to have four compurgators. The rank of a priest as equal to that of a thane is frequently recognized. ”

“ A landholder who had built a church for himself and his people would naturally desire that it should possess the dignity of a parish church, and was thus induced to provide a sufficient endowment for it. The people would naturally desire the convenience of having all the means of grace at their own church instead of having to carry their children to a distance for baptism and their dead for burial, and in some cases the more well-to-do freeholders would be willing to contribute to the cost of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Know all men, both now and hereafter, on the day of the dedication of the cemetery of Eston that I, Robert, son of Aher, gave to God and to the chapel of the same vill of Eston one virgate of land, containing sixty acres, and all tithe of my demesne of the same vill, and one mansion, for the health of my soul and of all my predecessors and successors. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The nobles, while thinking first of the glory of God, and the spiritual advantages of the prayers of a holy community for the founder, his family and descendants, were conscious also of the dignity which a monastery reflected upon the family which founded and patronized it, and not insensible to the temporal advantages of the establishment of a centre of civilization and religion in the midst of their dependents. ”

“ The mother churches received their Christianity from the bishop’s see, and were his spiritual subjects, and once a year went up in procession to worship at the cathedral as an act of homage. And these reunions would, in fact, promote the idea of brotherly communion and Christian unity, as the attendance of the Israelites on the three great festivals at their one temple in Jerusalem tended to maintain the national unity of the people as the people of God.
Nothing is free from abuse. ”

“ That no dispute between priests shall be brought before secular judges, but reconciled by their fellows or referred to the bishop; no priest shall desert the church to which he was ordained, but hold to it as his lawful spouse. That he do not deprive another of anything which belongs to him either in his church or parish or gildship; he shall not take another’s scholar without his leave; that in addition to lore, he diligently learn a handicraft; that the learned priest do not throw scorn on the half learned, but correct him ”

“ The nobles were following on the same lines, when they made one chaplain steward, another secretary, and another tutor, in addition to their not burdensome duties in the maintenance of Divine worship. So the people resorted to their parish priest to advise them in their domestic difficulties and extraordinary matters of business, to arbitrate in their differences, and make their wills, for the simple natural reason of his wider knowledge of affairs, his greater experience of mankind, his disinterestedness, and, not least, his sacred character. ”

“ The great difference between the monks and the friars was that the ideal of the monastic life was seclusion from the world for prayer and meditation with a view to the cultivation of one’s own soul; that of the friar’s life was devotion to active work. The great economical difference was that the monks were individually vowed to poverty, but as communities they were wealthy, while the friars were vowed to have no property individually or collectively, and to live of the alms of the people. ”

“ The chapel was endowed with a stipend for a perpetual chantry priest to say prayers there for the family of the bridge-builder, and for all Christian people; and no doubt the founder hoped for himself the prayers of all the Christian people who used his bridge. Those of us who, lounging about the churches of other countries as sight-seers, have seen the market women come in, set down their baskets [Pg 529] on the floor, and kneel down for a few moments for silent prayer, will easily understand the practical religious uses of these bridge-chapels. ”

“ Thurstan, son of Wini, in the time of King Edward the Confessor, gave the Manor of Harlow to the great monastery of St. Edmund, recently restored by Canute; with the manor the church appendant to it; the convent nominated to the rectory as any other patron would do, until Pope Boniface IX.—for the monastery claimed exemption from episcopal jurisdiction, and regarded no one but the Pope himself as its superior—gave the abbot licence to appropriate the church, and to provide for the cure of the parish either by one of the monks or by a secular priest as the abbot should think fit. ”

“ The Romance of King Arthur is not often quoted as an historical authority, but romances are a picture of contemporary manners and customs, and may be so far depended upon; and this daily service in the castles and manor houses of the Middle Ages is one of the facts of the life of the time which is abundantly illustrated in them. ”

“ 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, if the income of the benefice, or the private income of the incumbent, enabled him to obtain the help of a competent chaplain, that was accepted as on the whole the best solution. ”

“ In those feudal times the lord of the manor was the petty king of all the people, and if one of his sons had the personal qualifications, perhaps no other priest could fulfil the duties of rector of the parish with equal advantages. The relations of squire and parson in a country village are a little difficult, and a son of the ruling family could exercise an influence in the parish which a stranger could not; he could mediate between the lord and the people with greater influence on both sides than a stranger ”

“ The parochial history of the towns is very obscure. The facts point to the conclusion that the origin of parishes here was the same as in the country. There the lord of an estate built a church and provided a maintenance for a priest to minister to his family and dependents; and the priest’s spiritual authority was conterminous with the area of his patron’s civil jurisdiction; i.e. the estates were the parishes. The ancient towns, it is found, were frequently divided between several principal proprietors, who had rights of jurisdiction over their own land and the people living on it. ”

“ In many of the towns the civic authorities consented to hold the site and buildings of the friaries in trust, in order to evade the rule which forbade the orders themselves to hold property. The friars continued to live, and their continuance depended upon the daily voluntary alms of the townspeople. The churches of the friars were favourite places for civic functions and miracle plays; the people sought burial in their precincts; and down to the very eve of their dissolution a great number of wills, both of clergy and laity, contain small bequests to the friars. ”

“ The canopied stalls on the sides are filled by their prebendaries in surplice and furred cope; the vicars choral and the choristers are in their places in the subsellæ on each side; the long rows of benches in front of the stalls are filled by the clergy of the diocese, so many as can find room; the bishop in cope and mitre occupies his lofty canopied throne at the east end of the south line of stalls; the great nave beyond is crowded with the rest of the clergy and their synodsmen, and the citizens, and the people from the country round, attracted to the imposing spectacle. ”

“ At the ordinary daily services in parish churches it is very likely that there was some congregation; for attendance on the Divine service was highly regarded as a pious exercise, and pious people who had the leisure—women especially—would be likely to attend it; the custom of gathering poor people into almshouses in which they formed a kind of religious community with their chaplain, chapel, and daily prayers, would be likely to have its counterpart in the attendance of the pensioners of the parish church at the daily service in it ”

“ It is in the nature of things that many of these successful ceorls would be energetic and enterprising men who had looked out a tract of good soil in some neighbouring dale or amidst the surrounding waste, and brought it under cultivation, and created what was virtually a new township. The occasional visits of the parish priest or his chaplain would hardly satisfy the inhabitants of the new settlement for long. The new proprietor, in imitation of his betters, would be ambitious of having a church on his ground, and the law of Athelstan encouraged his laudable ambition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those who hold them must serve not the palace or the treasury, but the altar. The king has wherewithal to compensate those who work for him and fight his battles. Let him allow those who serve the King of kings to enjoy their fitting remuneration, and not to be deprived of it.” When King Richard, through the Archbishop of Canterbury, desired Bishop Hugh to send him a list of twelve of his canons to be employed in his affairs, Hugh replied that “he had often prohibited his clerks from intermeddling in secular affairs, and he certainly was not going to encourage such a thing now. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On week-days the vicar would provide at least daily mass, matins and evensong, and the chantries and special services would supply other masses.
In the pastoral care of the people, too, the vicar of a great parish was not left single-handed. Probably (as has been already said) each chantry priest, and, still more, each priest of a gild or service had a group of persons—the relatives of their founder, or brothers and sisters of their fraternity—who looked to them for spiritual ministrations; but besides these, the vicar sometimes had chaplains who were assistant-curates. ”