Life in a Medieval Village (20 page)

Yet dissatisfaction was inevitable. Protests and minor riots are recorded at numerous places, over labor service, tallage, merchet, the right to buy and sell land, mowing service, and other villein burdens.
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Similar incidents occurred on the Continent throughout the thirteenth century. For the time being, no large-scale movements developed, but the smoldering potential was there. Piers
Plowman
endorsed the existing order but insisted that it should be based on justice on the part of the lord, a philosophical solution with only limited practical merit. The villein was bound to resent not only his obligations but his status, and the lord could not forever hold him to either.

B
ESIDES BEING A VILLAGE AND A MANOR, ELTON
was one other thing: a parish, a church district. Like village and manor, village and parish did not always coincide. Some villages had more than one church, usually because they included more than one manor. Some parishes, especially in the north of England, included more than one village, indicating that a large estate, with its church, had been fractioned into several villages and hamlets. By the thirteenth century, however, most villages were geographically coterminous with their parishes, so that the village formed a religious as well as a secular community.
¹

The parish church, like the village, was a medieval invention, the ancient Romans having worshiped at private altars in their own homes. The thousands of Christian churches built in the villages across Europe in the Middle Ages were the product of two different kinds of foundation. Some were planted by the city cathedrals and their subordinate baptisteries, and formed an integral part of the Church establishment. Others were private or “proprietary” churches, built by landowners on their own property, to serve their households and
tenants. The landowner might be a wealthy layman, or a monastery, or a bishop. The church was the owner’s personal property, to be sold or bequeathed as he pleased. Its revenues went into his pocket. He appointed the priest, had him ordained, and paid him a salary. With the settlement of Northern Europe, these private-enterprise churches spread. In England they followed a similar development, and given the sanction of Saxon and Danish kings, acquired the important right to perform the sacraments of baptism and burial. The church tower became a village landmark, and the parish priest, who usually had enough Latin to witness and guarantee legal documents, became a valued member of village society.
²

It is likely that when Dacus reluctantly sold Elton to Aetheric in 1017 and it came into the possession of Ramsey Abbey, the property included a church. Seventy years later, Domesday Book states that Elton had “a church and a priest,” and in 1178 Pope Alexander III confirmed that “Elton with its church and all pertaining to it” belonged to Ramsey Abbey.
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Of the medieval rectors of Elton, only a few scattered names survive. Thuri Priest was rector in 1160, at the time of the earliest manorial survey; Robert of Dunholm in 1209; Henry of Wingham in mid-thirteenth century; and after 1262 Robert of Hale, a member of a local family whose names occur in the manorial court records.

Meanwhile the arrangement had undergone a change. The lord still appointed the rector
(persona
in the extents, hence “parson”), but now he bestowed the parish on him as a “living,” from which the appointee received all or most of the revenues. Although he was always a cleric, the rector did not necessarily serve in person, but might live elsewhere, hiring a deputy, usually a vicar, and profiting from the difference between the revenues he collected and the stipend he paid his substitute.
⁴

In general, a class difference existed between the rectors who served in person and those who merely collected the revenues. The former were typically local men, sons of free peasants or craftsmen, sometimes of villeins who had paid a fine to license their training and ordination. The absentee was more apt to be
a member of the nobility or gentry, a younger son who had been ordained and drew his income from parish churches rather than tenants’ rents.

Certain absentee rectors held several livings simultaneously. Some of these “pluralists” held only a few parishes and supervised them conscientiously; others held many and neglected them. A notorious example was Bogo de Clare, younger son of an earl, who in 1291 held twenty-four parishes or parts of parishes plus other church sinecures, netting him a princely income of £2,200 a year. Bogo spent more in a year on ginger than he paid a substitute to serve one of his parishes, in which he took little interest. A monk visiting one of Bogo’s livings on Easter Sunday found that in place of the retable (the decorative structure above the high altar), there were only “some dirty old sticks spattered with cow-dung.”
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The Church did not condone such excesses as that of Bogo, whom Archbishop John Pecham called “a robber rather than a rector.”
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Efforts were made to limit the number
of
benefices a man could hold, and bishops visited their parishes to check on conditions. In 1172 Pope Alexander III decreed that vicars must have adequate job security and must receive a third of their church’s revenues. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) further denounced the custom whereby “patrons of parish churches, and certain other persons who claim the profits for themselves, leave to the priests deputed to the service of them so small a portion that they cannot be rightly sustained,” and pronounced that the rector when not himself residing must see that a vicar was installed, with a guaranteed portion of the revenues.
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By the end of the thirteenth century there were about nine thousand parishes in England, perhaps a quarter of them vicarages. Rich parishes tended to attract men in search of income, leading to vicars in many market towns and large villages, and rectors in small ones.
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The “poor parson” of the Canterbury Tales was the brother of a plowman who had carted “many a load of dung…through the morning dew.” This parson “did not set his benefice to hire/ and leave his sheep encumbered in the mire…/ He was a
shepherd and no mercenary.” Despite his peasant background, Chaucer’s parson was “a learned man, a clerk/ who truly knew Christ’s gospel.”
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His colleagues in the country parishes were not all so well versed. Archbishop Pecham charged priests in general with an “ignorance which casts the people into a ditch of error.” Roger Bacon (c. 1214—c. 1294) accused them of reciting “the words of others without knowing in the least what they mean, like parrots and magpies which utter human sounds without understanding what they are saying.” The chronicler Gerald of Wales amused his readers with stories about the ignorance of parish priests: one who could not distinguish between Barnabas and Barabbas; another who, confusing St. Jude with Judas Iscariot, advised his congregation to honor only St. Simon at the feast of St. Simon and St. Jude. Still another could not distinguish between the Latin for the obligations of the two debtors in the parable (Luke 7:41-43), one of whom owed five hundred pence and the other fifty. When his examiner pointed out that if the sums were the same, the story had no meaning, the priest replied that the money must be from different mints, in one case Angevin pennies, in the other sterling.
¹⁰

Bishops ordaining candidates for the priesthood, or visiting parishes, often found both candidates and ordained clergy
illiteratus
—unlettered, meaning lacking in Latin and thus ignorant of the Scriptures and the ritual. Laymen were less severe. The dean of Exeter, touring parishes in Devon in 1301, found the parishioners almost universally satisfied with their priests as preachers and teachers.
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Facilities for the education of priests were scarce, and many aspiring novices could only apply to another parish priest for a smattering of Latin, the Mass, and the principal rites. The lucky few who were able to attend cathedral schools, monastic schools, and the universities were more likely to become teachers, Church officials, or secretaries in noble households than parish priests. A priest might, however, occasionally obtain a leave of absence to study theology, canon law, and the Bible.
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The appearance in the thirteenth century of manuals and treatises for the guidance of parish priests marked a new stage
of clerical professionalism. One of the most widely circulated was the
Oculus Sacerdotis
(Eye of the Priest), written by William of Pagula, vicar of Winkfield, Berkshire, in 1314. John Myrc’s vernacular, versified
Instructions for Parish Priests,
was a free translation of a portion of William of Pagula’s book, intended to inform the reader

How thou shalt thy parish preach
And what thou needest them to teach,
And what thou must thyself be.
¹³

Whether the income of the parish church was collected by a resident or an absentee rector, it came from the same sources. Three kinds of revenue were very ancient in England: plow-alms, soul-scot, and church-scot. The first was a charge on each plowteam, payable at Easter; the second was a mortuary gift to the priest, and the third a charge on all free men, paid at Martinmas, always in kind, usually in grain. These were all relatively small charges. The chief support of the church was the tithe or tenth, familiar in the Old Testament, but only becoming obligatory in the Christian Church in the Middle Ages. Gerald of Wales told a story about a peasant who owed ten stone of wool to a creditor in Pembroke at the time of shearing, and when he found that he had only that amount, sent a tithe of it, one stone, to his church, over the protest of his wife, and the remaining nine to his creditor, asking for extra time to make good the deficiency. But when the creditor weighed the wool, it weighed the full ten stone. By this example, Gerald said, “the wool having been miraculously multiplied like the oil of Elisha, many persons…are either converted to paying those tithes or encouraged in their readiness to pay.”
¹⁴

Tithes were spelled out in detail in a number of the Ramsey Abbey extents: in Holywell, the rector received from the abbot’s demesne tithes of sheaves from six acres of a field called Bladdicas, including two acres of wheat, one of rye, one of barley, and two of oats; and tithes of sheaves from the peasants in Southfield and “in the field west of the barns at Needingworth”; and “in the name of tithes” from the peasants, a penny per year
for each chicken, an obol for a calf or a sheep, a quarter-penny for a kid, “and if they have seven sheep or kids, the rector will have one of them and [make up the difference] in silver, according to the value of a tenth part.” He received a tenth of the milk every day in the year.
¹⁵
At Warboys the rector was also entitled to a tenth of the wool, linen, pigs, geese, and garden products.
¹⁶

Tithes were collected as a kind of income tax from the rector’s living. From his spiritual jurisdiction over the villagers he collected voluntary offerings, or oblations, at Mass, on the anniversaries of a parishioner’s death, at weddings and funerals, and from penitents after confession. Offerings might be in kind: the bread for communion, wax and candles, eggs at Easter, cheese at Whitsuntide, fowls at Christmas. At Broughton, at the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Mary, all the parishioners, free as well as villein, gave as many loaves of bread as they had plow animals, one-third of which went to the church, two-thirds to the paupers of the parish.
¹⁷

Finally, the rector had the income of his “glebe,” the land pertaining to the church which he held as a free man, owing no labor services or servile dues, and which he cultivated as a husbandman. Traditionally, the glebe was twice the normal holding of a villein, though in practice it varied. In 1279 the rector of the Elton church held a virgate, probably distributed in the fields, and, adjacent to the church, ten more acres and a farmstead.
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Surveys of other Ramsey Abbey villages list the rector’s lands in more detail. At Warboys, he held two virgates of land, a house and a yard, and common pasture “in the wood, the marsh, and other places.”
¹⁹
The rector of Holywell held a virgate, “half a meadow which is called Priestsholm,” three acres of meadow distributed in “many pieces,” a tenth of the villagers’ meadow, and shares of a pasture and a marsh.
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In Abbot’s Ripton, the rector had a virgate, a parsonage, three houses with tenants, and “common pasture in Westwood.”
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The rector of Elton also rented a piece of land called le Brach. The manorial court took unfavorable notice of certain of his activities, the jurors complaining that he “made pits on the common at Broadmoor,”
²²
and again that he “dug and made a
pit and took away the clay at Gooseholm to the general nuisance.”
²³
He may have been digging marl for fertilizer or clay to mend his walls. Medieval moralists were occasionally concerned lest the priest’s role as husbandman crowd out his spiritual life, and that “all his study [become] granges, sheep, cattle, and rents, and to gather together gold and silver.”
²⁴
Perhaps for this reason the glebe was sometimes farmed out to a layman, who paid rent to the rector and made a profit on the sale of the crops.

Nothing is known about the rectory at Elton in the thirteenth century, but some information has survived about other rectories, a handful of which, built in stone, still stand, though usually much altered. In size and characteristics the medieval parsonage evidently fell roughly between a manor house and a decent peasant house. That at Hale, Lincolnshire, was described as a hall house with two small bedchambers, one for residents and one for visitors, and a separate kitchen, bakehouse, and brewhouse.
²⁵
When the monks of Eynsham Abbey built a vicarage in 1268 for a church they had appropriated, they specified construction of oak timbers and a hall twenty-six feet by twenty with a buttery at one end and at the other a chamber and a privy.
²⁶
Like any other farmhouse, the rectory or vicarage included barns, pens, and sheds.

Records mention several persons assisting the rector or vicar in his professional work and daily life—chaplain, curate, clerk, page—without disclosing whether these were full- or part-time aides, or how they were compensated. Not infrequently there was also a wife or concubine. Clerical celibacy was a medieval ideal more often expressed than honored. Although two Lateran councils in the twelfth century prescribed it, a modern canon-law authority comments that in the thirteenth century “everyone who entered the clergy made a vow of chastity but almost none observed it.”
²⁷
Gerald of Wales states that “nearly all” English priests were married, though other sources indicate that only a minority were.
²⁸
Concubinage, usually entirely open, was more common. Robert Manning tells the tale of a woman who lived with a “right amorous priest” for many years and bore him four sons, three of whom became priests, the fourth a
scholar. After their father died, the four sons urged the mother to repent her “deadly sin.” The mother, however, declared that she would never repent “while I have you three priests to pray and chant for me and to bring me to bliss.” The mother died “sooner than she willed.” For three nights her sons sat by her body at the wake. On the first, at midnight, to their terror, “the bier began to quake.” On the second night it quaked again and suddenly a devil appeared, seized the corpse, and dragged it toward the door. The sons sprang up, carried it back, and tied it to the bier. On the third night at midnight a whole host of fiends invaded the house and