I

CHAP venient for the popes to have this means of paying and rewarding their officials, and also to receive the percentage which was required from each benefice, that the papal court always withstood reforms in this direction, even when pious popes desired them!" On the other hand, the English clergy in general were so sensible of the evil, that when the convocaA. D. 1430 tions chose delegates to attend the Council of Basle (from which so much reformation was expected), they instructed them, in the name of the Church of England, to demand that dispensatories for pluralities should be withheld, and also those for nonresidence; and that in no case should several parishes be united under one clergyman. But the evil was not abated then, nor for many years afterwards. A century later there was a definite attempt at legisla tion on the subject, but it fell to the ground. The

profits of the same, in the behalf
or by the authority of any of the
aforesaid foreigners, by way of
form, or title, or by any other
ways or means whatsoever, and
how long they have occupied, or
disposed of the same, and withal,
if any of the said foreigners are
now resident upon any benefices;
we command you to send us a true
certificate of all and singular the
premises into our high Court of
Chancery, under your Episcopal
seal, before the feast of the Ascen-
sion of our Lord next ensuing,
without further delay, returning
likewise this our writ unto us.
Witness myself at Westminster,
the sixteenth day of April, in
the forty-eighth year of our reign
of England; and of France the
thirty-fifth."

7 Bishop Gibson [Codex, p. 946]
quotes the following remarkable
catalogue of pluralists from Arch-
bishop Winchelsea's register at the

I

record of this is contained among the state papers, CHAP in the shape of some instructions given by the king to Cromwell, to be declared to the council, and put in immediate execution. Among these there is a sketch of a bill for regulating the absenteeism of the clergy, dated in St. Michael's term 1531. It was A.D. 1531 to have enacted that every spiritual person having preferment, and residing without the king's special license" in the court of Rome, or elsewhere out of the realm, shall have his revenue divided into three parts; one for himself, one for repairs of manors, buildings, &c., and one to be distributed in charity." No further notice of the project occurs, and it seems to have been superseded by the Pluralities Act [21 Hen. VIII., cap. 13], which did not really touch the evil. Men's minds, at a later date, were diverted from this and other important reforms, by the hairsplitting controversies raised by Puritans and other Protestants, and the extravagances of non-residence and pluralities continued down to our own times; but had they been properly reformed at the period of the Reformation, far more real and solid work would have been done among the souls of the people of England, and infinite scandals prevented among the clergy.

Another constitutional disease of the Church in Appropriations the pre-Reformation ages was that of Appropriations, a disease akin to, though not so deadening as, the Impropriations of post-Reformation ages.

383.

State Papers, vol. i. [1830], p.

• Impropriations are the alienation of tithes to laymen. Appropriations are the assignment of them to clerical corporations (for

so colleges and monasteries used to
be considered), which thus become
responsible for the performance of
the duties for which the tithes are
paid.

CHAP

I

In its earliest form, the appropriation of parishes with their tithes and spiritual charge was scarcely more than a transfer of patronage to monasteries, the whole ecclesiastical income of each parish being still used for the spiritual purposes of the parish. But after the conquest parishes were appropriated to monasteries in a more absolute manner, the income of the parish being transferred to the monastery, and the latter being responsible for the duties of it very much at their discretion. Within three hundred years, about one-third of the benefices in England were thus appropriated, and these generally the best endowed. However desirous the members of these monasteries might have been, individually, to act up to their responsibilities towards their dependent parishes, all experience illustrates the phenomenon Corpora that corporations never work up to the standard of their individual members: but that, on the contrary, the weakest link in the chain is the true exponent of their moral strength. Hence there were no districts which were more sunk in wickedness arising from neglect, in times within memory than those of which the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge had spiritual charge, especially in the immediate neighbourhood of those Universities. As we are no better, so we are probably no worse, than our ancestors; and the appropriated parishes of preReformation times were, no doubt, sadly neglected: so that wickedness and schism found an easy prey in them, as they have done in recent generations. As Colet states it, "all things were done by vicars and

tions and

the cure
of souls

1 Kennett's Case of Impropriations, p. 23.

2 It was a common thing in the ast generation for Fellows of Col

leges to perform a hasty and perfunctory service at three and four churches, if within easy riding distance, on the Sunday.

parish priests," that is by deputy; and there is a CHAP good deal of evidence to show that, in the early part of the sixteenth century, at least, the deputy was often a man who was neither respected nor respectable, but of the class who cried, "Put me, I pray thee, into one of the priest's offices that I may eat a piece of bread." An idea of the state to which parishes had been brought by this abuse of the system of appropriations may be gained from a letter of Archbishop Warham to Wolsey respecting the clergy of Kent. "A more poor sort of so great a number Poverty of in the clergy a man cannot lightly see, and, as I can clergy perceive, the cause is, forasmuch as all the chief benefices be appropriated to religious houses; and to the exhibition of the vicars is so small a portion assigned that they can scantly live withal. And if there be any good vicarage, divers of the said religious houses obtaineth dispensations of the See Apostolic to keep them in their own hands, and be served by religious men, and so they have almost all good parsonages and vicarages in their hands."4

Kentish

Such a state of things involved, no doubt, a low moral and intellectual condition in the parochial clergy, and from the general insufficiency of episcopal oversight, there must have been great want of discipline among them. Not that the whole of them were Good likely to have been sunk in ignorance and vice. There clergy were many like the Fen correspondent of Erasmus, John Watson, who were indeed fond of the Scotus whom Erasmus so reviles, but who yet devoted themselves to the earnest study of theology, and would rather

"Parish priests" was the old term for "curates in sole charge;" "parson" or "rector" being the

recognised term for the clergyman
primarily in cure of souls.

4

Ellis' Orig. Letters, III. ii. 30.

I

and evil clergy

CHAP be good Christians than anything else in the world." But there was abundant foundation for complaints as to the condition of the clergy, and these complaints (however unreasonable they may sometimes have been) were the natural outcome of abuses which indicated the deterioration and degeneracy of the medieval church system. They led to the alienation of a large portion of the laity from clergy, church, and religion: and when the great transition-tide set in, and society became reconstructed from its foundations, the hold of the Church upon the world had been so weakened that it was never wholly recovered. It was the sight of these results, as they grew, and the foresight of that to which they would eventually grow, which led wise and good men to call for the reformation of the abuses which caused them."

3420.

Brewer's Calend. St. Pap., ii.

The state of the Church in
Scotland and Ireland seems to
have been almost as bad as could
be at the period immediately pre-
ceding the Reformation. Sir James
English wrote from Perth respect-
ing the Church of Scotland in the
year 1515-"Every man spekis
quhat he will without blame. Yer
is na sclander punyst; ye man
hath ma words na ye mastir, and
will not be content except he ken
his masteris cunsell. Yer is na
order amang us, none of Goddis
preceptis ar kepit except ye first,
and that full ill. . . . Every man
taks up abbacy is that may
thay tarry not quhilk benefices be
vacand, thai tak them or thai fall,
for thai tyne the vertew of thai
twiche ground." [Brewer's Calend.
St. Pap., ii. 50.]

...

est;

As regards the Church of Ireland, there is evidence in the shape of a memorial, which was drawn

up for the King's information,
respecting the state of the country
at large and the means to be used
for its improvement. "Some
saith," says the writer, "that the
prelates of the Church and clergy
is much cause of all the misorder
of the land; for there is no arch-
bishop, nor bishop, nor abbot, nor
pryor, parson, nor vicar, nor any
other person of the Church, high
or low, great or small, English or
Irish, that useth to preach the Word
of God, saving the poor friars beg-
gars.
Also the Church of this
land use not to learn any other
science, but the law of Canon, for
covetousness of lucre transitory:
all other science, whereof grow
none such lucre, the parsons of the
Church doth despise. They could
more by the plough rustical, than
by lucre of the plough celestial to
which they have stretched their
hand, and look always backward.
They tend much more to lucre
of that plough whereof groweth

...