Read Ebook: Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England by Cutts Edward Lewes

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Two clerics in surplice hold the housel cloth to catch any of the sacred elements which might accidentally fall.

CONFESSION AT THE BEGINNING OF LENT 334

The priest in furred cope, the rood veiled; the altar has a red frontal. The two men are in blue habit. The woman on the right is all in black; the other, kneeling at a bench on the left, is in red gown and blue hood.

MARRIAGE 410

It represents the marriage of the Count Waleran de St. Pol with the sister of Richard, King of England. The count is in a blue robe, the princess in cloth of gold embroidered with green; the groomsman in red, the man behind him in blue, the prince in the background in an ermine cape. The ladies attending the princess wear cloth of gold, blue, green, etc.; the bishop is vested in a light green cope over an apparelled rochet, and a white mitre. The bishop takes hold of the wrists of the parties in joining their hands.

VESPERS OF THE DEAD 458

The mourners in black cloaks are at the east end of the stalls; the pall over the coffin is red with a gold cross; the hearse has about eighteen lighted tapers; the ecclesiastics seem to be friars in dark brown habit .

MEDIAEVAL NORWICH. 492

MEDIAEVAL EXETER. 498

MEDIAEVAL BRISTOL. 500

KNIGHTS DOING PENANCE AT THE SHRINE OF ST. EDMUND 535

The abbot is vested in a gorgeous cope and mitre; one of the monks behind him also wears a cope over his monk's habit.

PARISH PRIESTS AND THEIR PEOPLE.

OUR HEATHEN FOREFATHERS.

When 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, we tell them, of two thousand years of cultivation by an ever-increasing population.

On the other hand, we are helped to understand what the land was like at the time of the settlement in it of our Saxon forefathers, by the descriptions which our Colonial friends give us of their surroundings in Australia or Africa, where the general face of the country is still in its primeval state, the settlements of men are dotted sparsely here and there, the flocks and herds roam over "bush" or "veldt," and only just so much of the land about the settlements is roughly cultivated as suffices the wants of the settlers.

For in England, in those remote times of which we have first to speak, the land was, for the most part, unreclaimed. If we call to mind that the English population about the end of the sixth century could only have been about a million souls--200,000 families--we shall realize how small a portion of the land they could possibly have occupied. A large proportion of the country was still primeval forest, there were extensive tracts of moorland, the low-lying districts were mere and marsh, the mountainous districts wild and desolate. The country harboured wolf and bear, wild cattle and swine, beaver and badger, wild cat, fox, and marten, eagle, hawk, and heron, and other creatures, most of which have entirely disappeared, though some linger on, interesting survivals, in remote corners of the land.

Their possession of the country by the English was the result of recent, slow and desultory conquest. Independent parties of adventurers from the country round about the mouth of the Elbe had crossed the German Ocean in their keels, landed on the coast, or rowed up the rivers, and pushed their way slowly against a tenacious resistance. Then, when a party of the invaders had made good their conquest, came its division among the conquerors.

Our own history tells us so little of the details of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, that we have to call in what we know of the manners of their Teutonic neighbours and Scandinavian relatives to help us to understand it. The late Sir W. Dasent, in his "Burnt Njal," says that the Norse Viking, making an invasion with a view not to a mere raid, but to a permanent settlement, would lay claim to the whole valley drained by the river up which he had rowed his victorious keels; or, landing on the coast, would climb some neighbouring height, point out the headlands which he arbitrarily assigned as his boundaries on the coast, and claim all the hinterland which he should be able to subdue. The chief would allot extensive tracts to the subordinate leaders; and the freemen would be settled, after their native custom of village communities, upon the most fertile portions of the soil which their swords had helped to win. In the broad alluvial lands of the river valleys there would be ample space for several neighbouring townships; in forest clearings or fertile dales the townships would be scattered at more or less wide intervals. The unallotted lands belonged to the general community; it was Folk land, and its allotment from time to time, probably, in theory needed confirmation by a Folk-mote, but was practically made by the supreme chief.

Every township possessed a tract of arable land, which was divided by lot yearly among the families of the freemen; a tract of meadow, which was reserved for hay, cultivated and harvested by the common labour; a wide expanse of pasture, into which each family had the right to turn a fixed number of cattle and sheep; and into the forest, a fixed number of swine to feed on the acorns, mast, and roots. The people were rude agriculturists, not manufacturers, not traders, not civilized enough to profit by the civilization which the Romans had established in the country; they stormed and sacked the towns, and left them deserted, and selected only the most fertile spots for occupation.

It is a subject of dispute among our most learned historians to what extent the native Britons were slain or retired before the invaders, or to what extent they were taken as captives, or reappeared from their fastnesses after the slaughter was over, to be the slaves of the conquerors. When we first get glimpses of the situation of things after the conquest, we find that the British language and religion have disappeared from the Saxon half of the country; and this implies the disappearance of the great body of the people. The fact of the continuance of some ancient place-names, chiefly of great natural features, as hills and rivers, and of a few British words for things for which the Teutons had no names, would be sufficiently accounted for by the survival of a very small remnant.

In their native seats the social condition of these Angle and Saxon freemen was patriarchal and primitive; they venerated their chiefs as Woden-born; they elected one of them as their leader in battle; but they did not obey them as their subjects. On questions of general importance the chiefs and wise men advised the Folk-mote, and the people said "Aye" or "No." But their circumstances in their new conquests led to changes. It was necessary to maintain some sort of permanent military organization not only for the defence of their new possessions, and the extension of their conquests against the old inhabitants of the island, but also against the encroachments of rival tribes of their own countrymen. And a supreme chief, to whom all paid a kind of religious veneration, who exercised permanent military authority over lesser chiefs and people, soon became a king; limited, however, in power by the ancient institutions of the Council of the wise men, and the assent or dissent of the Folk-mote.

The several parties of invaders gradually extended their conquests until they met, and then made treaties or fought battles with one another, until, finally, by the end of the sixth century, they had organized themselves into seven independent kingdoms.

The freemen of each Township managed their own affairs in a town meeting; a number of neighbouring townships were grouped into what was called by the Saxons south of the Humber a Hundred, by the Angles north of the Humber a Wapentake; and each township sent four or five of its freemen to represent it in the Hundred-mote every three months. Three times a year, in summer, autumn, and midwinter, a general meeting of the freemen was held--a Folk-mote--at some central place; to which every township was required to send so many footmen armed with sword, spear, and shield, and so many horsemen properly equipped. At these Folk-motes affairs of general interest were determined, justice was administered by the chief and priests, and probably it was at these meetings that the great acts of national worship were celebrated. Except for these periodical meetings, the scattered townships existed in great isolation. A striking illustration of this isolation is afforded by laws of Wihtred of Kent and of Ine of the West Saxons, which enact--or perhaps merely record an ancient unwritten law--that if any stranger approached a township off the highway without shouting or sounding a horn to announce his coming, he might be slain as a thief, and his relatives have no redress. A subsequent law of Edgar enacts that if he have with him an ox or a dog, with a bell hanging to his neck, and sounding at every step, that should be taken as sufficient warning, otherwise he must sound his horn. The local exclusiveness produced by this isolation, the suspicion and dislike of strangers, survive to this day in secluded villages in the wilder parts of the country.

These Teutonic tribes were heathen at the time of their coming into the land. Of their religion and its observances our own historians have given no detailed account, and few incidental notices. Our names for the days of the week, Sun-day, Moon-day, Tuisco's-day, Woden's-day, Thor's-day, Frya's-day, Saeter's-day, make it certain that our Anglo-Saxon ancestors worshipped the same gods as their Scandinavian neighbours, and probable that their religion as a whole was similar. Their supreme god was Odin or Woden, with whom were associated the twelve AEsir and their goddess-wives, and a multitude of other supernatural beings. In their belief in an All-father, superior to all the gods and goddesses--we recognize a relic of an earlier monotheism. They had structural temples, and in connection with their temples they had idols, priests, altars, and sacrifices. They believed in the immortality of the soul, in an intermediate state, and a final heaven and hell. The souls of the brave and good, they believed, went to Asgard, the abode of the AEsir; there the warriors all day enjoyed the fierce delight of combat, and in the evening all their wounds healed, and they spent the night in feasting in Valhalla, the hall of the gods; the wicked went to Niflheim, a place of pain and terror. But the time would come when the earth, and sun, and stars, and Valhalla, and the gods, and giants, and elves, should be consumed in a great and general conflagration, and then Gimli and Nastrond, the eternal heaven and hell, should be revealed. Gimli--a new earth adorned with green meadows, where the fields bring forth without culture, and calamities are unknown; where there is a palace more shining than the sun, and where religious and well-minded men shall abide for ever; Nastrond--a place full of serpents who vomit forth venom, in which shall wade evil men and women, and murderers and adulterers.

A knowledge of their religious customs would help us to judge what hindrance they opposed to the reception of the system of the Christian Church; or, on the other hand, what facilities they offered for the substitution of one for the other; but it is only from the assumption that the religious customs of our English ancestors were similar to those of the Norsemen that we are able to form to ourselves any conception on the subject.

In Iceland, conformably to the constitution of its government, each several district had its priest who not only presided over the religious rites of the people, but also directed the deliberations of the people when their laws were made, and presided over the administration of justice .

Sir W. Dasent says that after the Norse conqueror had marked out his boundaries and settled his people on their holdings, and chosen a site for his own rude timber hall, he erected in its neighbourhood a temple in which his followers might worship the gods of their forefathers, and that this was one means of maintaining their habitual attachment to his leadership. The evidence leads to the conclusion that both Scandinavians and Teutons had very few structural temples, perhaps only one to each tribe or nation; and perhaps only three great annual occasions of tribal or national worship. We get a glimpse of one of these structural temples in the story of the conversion of Norway. The great temple at Maere, in the Drontheim district, contained wooden images of the gods; the people assembled there thrice a year at midwinter, spring, and harvest; the people feasted on horseflesh slain in sacrifice, and wine blessed in the name and in honour of the gods; and human victims were sometimes offered.

The English townships, generally, it is probable, had no structural temples, but sacred places of resort, as an open space in the forest, or a hilltop, or a striking mass of rock, or a notable tree or well. The religious observances at such places would probably not be a regular worship of the gods, but such superstitions as the passing of children through clefts in rocks and trees, dropping pins into wells, and others; these superstitions survived for centuries, for they are forbidden by a law of Canute, and one of them, the consultation of wells, so late as by a canon of Archbishop Anselm; and, in spite of laws, and canons, and civilization, and a thousand years of Christianity, some of them survive among the peasantry of remote districts to this very day.

Again, there is a remarkable absence all through the history of any mention of, or allusion to, the existence of a priesthood ministering among the people. The only priest clearly mentioned is the worldly-minded Coifi spoken of above, but as he is mentioned as "the chief of the king's priests," we assume that there was a staff of them, probably attached to the king's temple at Godmundingham. We suppose that Ethelbert of Kent, and Redwald of East Anglia, would also have a priest or priests attached to their temples; but we find no trace or indication of any others.

This all tends to confirm our belief that there were few structural temples, one for each kingdom, or perhaps one for each of the great tribes which had coalesced into a kingdom; and that the priests were only a small staff attached to each of these temples; while all the rest of the temples were open-air places to which the neighbouring inhabitants resorted for minor observances, without the assistance of any formal priesthood.

THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH.

The 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 ancestral kingdom of Northumbria, sent to the Fathers of Iona, among whom he had learnt Christianity during his exile, for missionaries to convert his people; how Sigebert, King of the East Saxons, and Peada, sub-King of the Middle Angles in Mercia, obtained missionaries from Northumbria; how Sigebert, King of the East Angles, invited Bishop Felix to give to his people the religion and civilization which he had learnt in exile in Burgundy; how the Italian Bishop Birinus came to the Court of King Cynegils, and converted him, and taught among the men of Wessex; and, finally, how Wilfrid of York began the conversion of the South Saxons.

In the Apostolic Age, the conversion of people in a condition of ancient civilization began among the lower classes of the people, and ascended slowly man by man through the higher classes, and it was three hundred years before the conversion of the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the religion of the empire. In the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the work began in every case with the kings and the higher classes of the people; and the people under their leadership abandoned their old religion and accepted Christianity as the national religion, and put themselves under the teaching of the missionaries, as a general measure of national policy.

The explanation of this probably is that their Teutonic kinsmen, Goths, Burgundians, and Franks, who had carved for themselves kingdoms out of the body of the Roman empire, having accepted the religion and the civilization of the people they had conquered, were growing rapidly in prosperity and the arts of civilized life. Christianity was the religion of the new Teutonic civilization, and heathenism was a part of the old state of barbarism. The Angles and Saxons, when they fastened upon this derelict province of the empire, were too barbarous to appreciate civilization, and destroyed it; but by the time that they had been settled for some generations in their new seats they had outgrown their old wild heathenism; and their kings had become sufficiently politic to desire to learn how to raise the new kingdoms which they governed to an equality with those of the kindred Continental nations. Hence, some of the heptarchic kings sought for Christian teachers to help them, and others were willing to receive them when they offered themselves.

Our previous study of the organization, religion, and customs of the people will help us to understand the process of the revolution. The kings, when converted, put the matter before the constitutional council of chiefs and wise men, and with their assent, and perhaps after a reference of the question to a folk-mote, formally adopted the new religion. The history which Bede gives of the first acceptance of Christianity in Northumbria, under the teaching of Paulinus, affords a profoundly interesting example of the process--the long hesitation of the king, the discussion in the witan, the general acceptance of the new faith, the zeal of the chief priest in destroying the national temple, the flocking of the people to the preaching of Paulinus, and their baptism in multitudes in the neighbouring rivers.

In no instance were the missionaries persecuted; in no instance did the kings coerce their people into the acceptance of the new religion. In such a wholesale transition from one religion to another, it is not surprising that there occurred partial and temporary relapses, as in Kent and Essex, on the death of King Ethelbert, 616, in Wessex on the death of Cynegils, 643, and again in Essex, after the plague of 664; still less surprising that old superstitions retained their hold of the minds of a rude and ignorant people for centuries.

If we are right in our conjectures that every kingdom had a national temple at the principal residence of the king with a small staff of priests, and a few smaller temples with their priests under the patronage of some of the subordinate chiefs, and that these temples were resorted to by the people for special acts of common worship at the great festivals three or four times in the course of the year, then it would not be difficult for the new religion to supply to the people all that they had been accustomed to of religious observances. Churches on the sites of the old temples, with their clergy, and services on the great festivals of the Christian year, would satisfy the customs of the people; and, in fact, the circumstances of the Christian missionaries led in the first instance to arrangements of this nature.

In every kingdom the king, who had been the patron of the old religion, took the new teachers under his protection, and made provision for their maintenance by the donation of an estate in land with farmers and slaves upon it; thus Ethelbert gave to Augustine a church and house in Canterbury, and land outside the city for a site for his monastery, and estates at Reculver and elsewhere for maintenance; Oswald gave to Aidan the isle of Lindisfarne, under the shadow of his principal residence at Bamborough; Ethelwalch gave Wilfred eighty-seven hides at Selsey, and Wilfrid began his work, as probably the other missionary bishops did, by emancipating his slaves and baptizing them; Cynegils, on his baptism, gave Birinus lands round Winchester, and his son Coinwalch endowed the church there with three manors; a little later, Wulfhere of Mercia gave Chad a wild tract of a hundred thousand acres between Lichfield and Ecclesfield. This was the "establishment" and beginning of the "endowment" of the Church in England.

The bishop in every kingdom first built a church and set up Divine service, then simultaneously set up a school, and invited the king and chiefs to send their sons to be educated. Aidan took twelve youths of noble birth as his pupils, and added slaves whom he purchased. The young men of noble families showed themselves eager to avail themselves of the teaching and training of the missionaries, and readily offered themselves to training for Holy Orders. The ladies at first, before there were monasteries for women in England, went to the monasteries at Brie and Chelles near Paris, and at Andelys near Rouen, which were under the government of members of the Frankish royal families. From his central station the bishop went out and sent his priests on missionary journeys to the neighbouring townships, to teach and baptize.

We know that all the first missionary bishops, except Felix and Birinus, and perhaps they also, and most of their clergy, had been trained in the monastic life of that time, so that it was natural to them to live in community, under the rule of a superior, a very simple and regular life, with frequent offices of prayer, and duties carefully defined, and scrupulously fulfilled; a beautiful object-lesson on the Christian life for the study of the king and his household, and the people round about the bishop's town.

Bede gives some interesting stories which illustrate this early phase of the English conversion. He tells us how Paulinus preached all day long to the people at Yeverin and Catterick in Northumbria, and at Southwell in Lindsey, and baptized the people by hundreds in the neighbouring rivers. He tells us how Aidan preached to Oswald's Court and people, and the King interpreted for him; how Aidan travelled through the country on foot, accompanied by a group of monks and laymen, meditating on the scriptures, or singing psalms as they went; not that he needed to travel on foot, for King Oswin had given him a fine horse which he might use in crossing rivers, or upon any urgent necessity; but a short time after, a poor man meeting him, and asking alms, the good bishop bestowed upon him the horse with its royal trappings. We learn from the same authority that the company which attended a missionary bishop in his progress through the country were not always singing psalms as they went. Herebald, a pupil of St. John of Beverley, relates how one day as that bishop and his clergy and pupils were journeying, they came to a piece of open ground well adapted for galloping their horses, and the young men importuned the bishop for permission to try their speed, which he reluctantly granted; and so they ran races till Herebald was thrown, and, striking his head against a stone, lay insensible; whereupon they pitched a tent over him.

An "interior" picture is afforded by a sentence in the life of Boniface, who was afterwards to be the Apostle of Germany. When the itinerant teachers used to come to the township in which Winfrid's father was the principal proprietor, they were hospitably entertained at his father's house; and the child would presently talk with them as well as he could, at such an early age , about heavenly things, and inquire what might hereafter profit himself and his weakness .

Finally Bede sums up the work of this period. "The religious habit was at that period in great veneration; so that wheresoever any clergyman or monk happened to come, he was joyfully received by all persons as God's servant; and if they chanced to meet him on the way, they ran to him, and, bowing, were glad to be signed with his hand, or blessed with his mouth. On Sundays they flocked eagerly to the Church or the monasteries, not to feed their bodies, but to hear the Word of God; and if any priest happened to come into a village, the inhabitants flocked together to hear the word of life; for the priests and clergymen went into the village on no other account than to preach, baptize, visit the sick, and, in short, to take care of souls."

So Cuthbert, a little later, not only afforded counsels and an example of regular life to his monastery, "but often went out of the monastery, sometimes on horseback, but oftener on foot, and repaired to the neighbouring towns, where he preached the way to such as were gone astray; which had been also done by his predecessor Boisil in his time. He was wont chiefly to visit the villages seated high among the rocky uncouth mountains, whose poverty and barbarity made them inaccessible to other teachers. He would sometimes stay away from the monastery one, two, three weeks, and even a whole month among the mountains, to allure the rustic people by his eloquent preaching to heavenly employments."

It seems likely that the itinerating missionaries, on arriving at a township, would seek out the chief man, first to ask hospitality from him, and next to engage his interest with the people to assemble together at some convenient place to hear his preaching. When the people were converted, he would make arrangements for periodical visits to them for Divine service, and the "convenient place" would become their outdoor church; and there is good reason to believe that in many cases a cross of stone or wood, whichever was the most accessible material, was erected to mark and hallow the place.

Even after a priest was permanently settled, and a church built at the ville of the lord of the land, the scattered hamlets on the estate would still, perhaps for centuries, have only open-air stations for prayer. It is very possible that some of these were the places where the people, while unconverted, had been used to assemble for their ancient religious ceremonies.

Some of the Saxon churchyard crosses which still remain, as at Whalley, Bakewell, Eyam, etc., possibly were station crosses. Possibly the well which exists in some churches and churchyards, and the yew tree of vast antiquity found in many churchyards, would carry us back, if we knew their story, to pre-Christian times and heathen ceremonials.

In time a church or chapel was built in this accustomed place of assembly, as we shall find in a later chapter. But here we have to throw out a conjecture as to an intermediate state of things between the open-air station and the structural church. We have before us the curious fact that usually the rector of a church is liable for the repair of the chancel, and the people for the repair of the nave. This seems to point to the fact that the forerunner of the rector built the first chancel, and left the people to build the nave; and we suggest the following explanation; at first in the worship of these stations, a temporary table was placed on trestles, and a "portable altar" upon that, and so the holy mysteries were celebrated. But in rainy weather this was inconvenient and unseemly; and the rector of the parish provided a kind of little chapel for the protection of the altar and ministrant; indeed, there is an ancient foreign canon which requires rectors to do so. Then the parishioners, for their own shelter from the weather, built a nave on to the chancel, communicating with it by an arch through which the congregation could conveniently see and hear the service.

THE MONASTIC PHASE OF THE CHURCH.

We 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 kingdom would have two motives for desiring to have such establishments beside them. First they had very likely in some cases been the patrons of a temple or an idol, and a priest, near their principal residence, and would desire to maintain their influence over their dependents and neighbours by keeping up a similar place of religious worship for them. Secondly, as enlightened men and zealous converts, they would be glad to have near them some of these new teachers of religion and civilization, and to establish one of these centres of light and leading to the neighbouring country. The bishops also obtained grants of land from the king in suitable places, in order to found on them new centres of evangelization.

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