CHAPTER XVII.

THE CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY.

The enforcement of celibacy upon the clergy was an important feature in the plan of the Hildebrandine reformers of the eleventh century. The idea which inspired the enthusiasm of the foremost Churchmen of the time was, no doubt, a grand one. It was to bring the national churches into practical co-operation by a world-wide ecclesiastical organization, and to place the spiritual authority of the whole Church in the hand of one man, in order to control the world-power of kings and princes, and check the manifold abuses which at that time especially threatened to corrupt and secularize the Church. The clergy were intended in the Hildebrandine scheme to be the Pope’s local agents in the administration of this ecclesiastical monarchy; and in order to detach them from secular and local ties it was proposed to make the secular clergy a kind of Religious Order--an anticipation, in some respects, of the organization of the subsequent Orders of Friars.

We must do the authors of the scheme the justice to remember that they honestly believed that the celibate state--not the mere accident of being unmarried, but the chosen and vowed state--was a higher condition of life; and it was easy to apply St. Paul’s advice to those who could accept it, to the special condition of the clergy:--“The unmarried (priest) careth for the things of the Lord, that (he) may be holy both in body and spirit, but the married (priest) careth for the things of the world.” It was easy to draw a contrast between the parish priest with a wife and family, bound by a thousand ties to the ordinary interests and anxieties of the world, and the celibate priest, who wants nothing beyond the priest’s chamber and his humble fare, and who gives his whole mind and soul to his daily devotions and his spiritual ministrations among his flock; his rusty cassock a uniform as honourable as the soldier’s war-stained coat, his ascetic life ensuring the reverence which even the worldly-minded pay to those who despise worldly things.

To the fulfilment of this idea the great body of the secular clergy in Germany, Italy, and France, as well as England, offered for centuries a stubborn resistance. They stood on the irrefragable ground that the priests and Levites of the Old Dispensation were married men; that our Lord and His apostles gave no such commandment to the Church; that, as a matter of history, some of the apostles were married men; and that for ten centuries bishops and priests of the Church all over the world had married. 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 majority of the clergy probably were influenced by the broad common sense which pronounced the ultramontane idea to be unscriptural, transcendental, novel, and, therefore, questionable; and, lastly, a burden which no one had the right to impose upon the unwilling. Some of them tauntingly desired the pope to see if he could get the spirits from above to leave their stations and come and rule the Churches under his Holiness, since men were not good enough for him.

The attempt to introduce celibacy among the secular clergy had been begun in the latter part of the Saxon period. We have seen that kings made laws and bishops made canons against the married clergy. We cannot have better evidence than that of Ælfric’s famous pastoral address, that the Saxon clergy generally had ignored these laws and canons, and that it had not been found practicable to enforce them. Ælfric declares that--

The Four General Councils forbade all marriages to ministers of the altar, and especially to mass-priests [which is a misstatement], and that the canons command that no bishop nor priest shall have in his house any woman except his mother or other person who is above suspicion. “This, to you priests,” he says, “will seem grievous, because ye have your misdeeds in custom” [you are accustomed to married priests], “so that it seems to yourselves that ye have no sin in living in female intercourse as laymen do, and say that Peter the Apostle had a wife and children. So he and others had before their conversion, but then forsook their wives and all earthly things” [which is, to say the least, a doubtful assumption]. “Beloved,” he goes on, “we cannot now forcibly compel you to chastity, but we admonish you nevertheless that ye observe chastity as Christ’s ministers ought in good reputation to the pleasure of God.”

Gregory VII., in the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1074, took a step in advance of previous legislation on the subject. He peremptorily forbade marriage to the clergy, pronounced sentence of excommunication against those who refused to put away their wives, and forbade the laity to be present at mass when they officiated.

In adopting this legislation in England, Lanfranc considerably modified it. In the Synod of Winchester, in 1076, it was decreed that no canon should be married; the married parochial clergy were not required to put away their wives, but those who were not married were forbidden to take any; and bishops were required not to ordain deacons or priests unless they declare that they have not wives. But this legislation seems to have been largely ignored, and the disobedience winked at.

In 1102, a national synod, held at Westminster, under Anselm of Canterbury and Gerard of York, sought to draw the line more strictly. It enacted that no canon, and no one above the order of sub-deacon, might marry; required those who were married to put away their wives; forbade a married priest to say mass, and the people to hear him. It added another edict, to which we shall have to refer hereafter--that sons of priests were not to succeed to their fathers’ benefices.

It was soon found that it was not possible to enforce these decrees, and the Pope was appealed to on the question. He was so convinced of the difficulty, that he dispensed with the canons, and in a letter (1107) to Anselm gave reasons for so doing, which contain valuable evidence of the condition of things. He founded the dispensation on the particular circumstances of the English Church, where, he observes, the greater and more valuable part of the clergy were the sons of priests, and therefore he gives Anselm a commission to promote such persons in the Church. He likewise empowers him to dispense with the canons in other cases where the untractableness of the English and the interest of religion should make it necessary. Anselm’s canons were repeated by William of Canterbury and Thurstan of York in 1126 and 1127, but were met with a stubborn resistance.[252]

After a short time bishops and great dignitaries ceased to be married men, and sought to enforce the canons on celibacy which they helped to make. Cathedral dignitaries also generally paid outward respect to the canons, but some of them had unacknowledged wives.[253]

In 1128, at a national synod held in London, the synod resigned the dealing with the recalcitrant clergy into the king’s hands. The king (Henry I.) disappointed the archbishops by abstaining from any attempt to enforce celibacy on the clergy, but he ingeniously took advantage of the opportunity to raise a revenue out of them by permitting the clergy to retain their wives on payment of a fee for the licence to do so. The king was said to have raised a great sum of money by this device, which implies that a great number of the clergy were married and retained their wives. King John, on the publication of the Interdict, seized the wives of the clergy, and only released them on payment of heavy ransom.

Synod after synod continued to legislate against them.[254]

In 1222, a synod held at Oxford, under Archbishop Stephen Langton, enacted that if beneficed men or men in sacred orders should presume to retain their partners publicly in their dwelling-houses (_hospitiis_), or should elsewhere have public access to them to the public scandal, they should be coerced by the withdrawal of their benefice; and that the clergy might not leave such partners (_i.e._ wives) anything in their wills. It also attacked the poor wives, enacting that if they did not leave their partners they should be excluded from the church and the sacraments; if that did not suffice, they should be stricken with the sword of excommunication; and, lastly, the secular arm should be invoked against them.[255]

Archbishop Richard of Wethershead, in 1229 or 1230 repeated the decree that men of the order of sub-deacon and upwards who had married should put away their wives, though they were unwilling and refused to consent,[256] and if they persisted in having publicly a female partner, should, after a first, second, and third warning, be deprived of every benefice and office.

St. Edmund the Canonized Archbishop, in 1234 or 1235, enacted that if any clerics who had been suspended for incontinency should presume to continue to exercise their office they should be deprived of their benefices, and for their double fault _perpetuo damnentur_. He tries to make the rectors inform against the clerics in their parishes, threatening that if a case comes to his knowledge by common report before the rector has given in his accusation against his brother, the rector shall be taken to have known of it, and shall be punished as a partaker in the sin. Lastly, he decrees that prelates (archdeacons, officials, and rural deans) who presume to support such persons in their iniquity, especially for the offer of money or of any other temporal advantage, shall be subject to the same penalty.

In 1237, Cardinal Otho came from Rome at the request of the king (Henry III.), unknown to the nobles, and summoned a national council at St. Paul’s. It was understood that he was going to make strong decrees against the abuses of the clergy, and especially against the pluralists and the illegitimates, and feeling ran so high among the clergy that the legate obtained from the king an attendance of some nobles, and a guard of some armed knights and about two hundred soldiers, who were placed in ambush for his protection. The decree against the pluralists was so vehemently opposed that the cardinal postponed this question till the Pope could be appealed to.

The canon against the married clergy declared that unless clerks, especially those in holy orders, who publicly keep concubines in their houses, or in those of others’, dismiss them therefrom within a month, they shall be suspended from every office and benefice, and if they persist, shall be deprived. And “we strictly order that archbishops and bishops shall make diligent inquiries throughout all their deaneries, and that what we have decreed shall be observed.”

The canon on sons of priests forbade the prelates from presuming henceforth under any pretext, or by any fraud, to appoint or admit any to benefices which their fathers held by any kind of title, either to the whole or to part, and that they who already hold such benefices shall be deprived.

In 1265, Cardinal Othobon presided over a national council at London, which was of great authority, and was regarded subsequently as a rule of discipline for the English Church, in which the preceding legislation was again repeated.

The Council of Reading, under Archbishop Peckham, in 1279, refers to the canon of Othobon _contra concubinarios_, and orders that archdeacons shall read it at their visitations and see that it is read by the rural deans at their chapters (the laity being excluded), and in case of neglect they shall fast on bread and water on the six week days (unless infirmity hinder them) until they have read or caused it to be read at the next chapter.

Were the laity excluded to screen the infirmities of their pastors, or because the expression of lay dissent would have encouraged the clergy in their contumacy? May we conjecture that, in spite of the urgent commands of the archbishop, the reading of the canon was often omitted, and that the archdeacons and rural deans excused themselves from the consequent penance under favour of the saving clause?[257]

The legislation is itself a witness to the existence of the practices which it tries to suppress. We need no further proof that in the thirteenth century many of the clergy were married men, that in some cases they lived openly with their wives in their dwelling-houses, or, in other cases, they visited them openly in separate houses provided for them; that they refused to give them up in spite of repeated synodical decrees; that clerics who were not themselves married countenanced their married brethren; that even the dignified officials whose business it was to take proceedings against them, hung back from doing so.

After the middle of the fourteenth century this subject disappears from the acts of the synods; not because the clergy had come universally to obey the former canons, but because the question had found a solution, which we proceed to describe. Celibacy was confessedly not a Divine ordinance, but an ecclesiastical regulation, and so long as the two evils were avoided (1) of the parochial benefices being overburdened by the demands of an avowed family; and (2) of the hereditary descent of benefices by the absence of lawful heirs; the ecclesiastical authorities might be satisfied with the obedience of a large proportion of the clergy, and willing to connive at the solution of the question to which the rest resorted.

The solution was as follows: The secular cleric was not bound by any Divine ordinance to celibacy, and did not, like the monks, take any vow of celibacy on admission to Orders. It was only an ecclesiastical regulation; and he took leave to evade the canon. If he married, the marriage was not void in itself, it was only voidable if brought before the Ecclesiastical Court during the lifetime of the parties; but he had taken his precautions in view of that contingency; the marriage was irregularly performed in some particular, or performed in such circumstances that it was incapable of legal proof. It was something like the morganatic marriages of German princes, illegal, derogatory, not conferring on wife and children the status and rights of legal wife and children, but still not in fact, or in the estimation of society, immoral and disreputable.

It is notorious that in the fifteenth century there were many ecclesiastics, from the popes downwards, who had wives, but not living in their houses, and not presented to the world as wives,[258] and they had children who were presented to the world as nephews and nieces. Warham, the last Archbishop of Canterbury before the Reformation, is said (by Erasmus[259]) to have had a wife who was not secluded from the knowledge and society of his friends; Cranmer certainly married his second wife, the niece of Osiander, before he was archbishop, and did not sever his ties with her after he became archbishop. And it is clear that these relations were not regarded as immoral and disgraceful; in fact, the common sense of mankind gives easy absolution for the breach of inequitable laws.[260]

But there is no doubt that the ambiguity of such relations, at the best, laid open those who entered into them to just censure, and must have lowered their own moral tone and that of those thus connected with them. Neither is it to be denied that enforced celibacy, and the loose notions encouraged by such connections as those here described, led to a certain amount of profligacy which admits of no excuse or palliation.

So the ultramontane policy at length won a victory--of a sort. It succeeded in preventing the clergy from having wives by conniving at their concubines; it left no legitimate sons of rectors to claim the heritage of their fathers’ benefices, and gave dispensations to their illegitimate sons; it established a celibate priesthood, with all the scandals and suspicions associated with it; it withdrew its clergy from the ordinary affairs of life, and at the same time from the leadership of the current practical life of the people. In a biting phrase of the time of Matthew Paris, “The pope deprived the clergy of sons, and the devil sent them nephews.”

We have given a--perhaps disproportionately--long chapter to a not very agreeable subject; but it seemed desirable to take the pains necessary to put the matter in its proper light, and not to allow the Englishmen of the great period, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, to lie under the suspicion of being so ungodly that the clergy generally lived in open immorality, and the laity thought little the worse of them for it.

* * * * *

An entry in a MS. Book of Ecclesiastical Causes reveals the possible complications which might arise out of these marriages. Marriages of the clergy were not null and void, they were only voidable by proceedings which must be taken in the lifetime of the parties. So that it was always possible that the children of such a marriage might after their father’s death claim as heirs to his estate, and might have the means of proving their parents’ marriage; in which case they would inherit to the exclusion of those who had thought themselves the heirs. For example, Sir John de Sudley, knight, and Elizabeth, wife of Sir Baldwyn de Frevyle, knight, relatives and heirs of Peter, the uncle of the said Sir John, a sub-deacon, alleged that marriage had been contracted by the said sub-deacon, to their exclusion from the heirship, and prayed that the marriage might be pronounced null, lest the children of the said sub-deacon should claim his heirship. Sir Peter de Montford seems to be the name of the sub-deacon aforesaid, and Margaret Furnivale that of his wife.[261]

* * * * *

Chaucer, in “The Miller’s Tale,” seems incidentally to show what was the popular view of the children of a cleric. The Miller, a Yeoman, a man of comparative wealth and consideration in his village, had married a parson’s daughter:--

A wife he hadde commen of noble kin, The parson of the town her father was.

Her “noble kin” points perhaps to the fact that the parson of the town was of the family of the lord of the manor. She had received the education of a lady--

She was yfostered in a nonnerie.

As to her personal character--

She was proud and pert as is a pie.

Next the poet puts upon his stage the daughter of this worthy pair--

A daughter hadden they betwixt them two;

and it is what he says about this young lady which proves most clearly that neither mother nor daughter suffered in the estimation of society from the condition of their birth:

The parson of the town, for she was faire, In purpose was to maken her his heire Both of his catel and of his messuage, And strange he made it of her marriage; His purpose was for to bestow her hie Into some worthie blood of ancestrie.

Geoffrey of Childewick, a knight, married Clarissa, the daughter of a country priest, but she was the sister of the famous John Mansell, the minister of Henry III.

A man was called priest’s son, not as a nickname, but as a surname recognized in formal legal documents, as in the “Pleas of the Crown,” c. 1220, Hugo Clark appeals _Paganus filius Sacerdotis_ and others of having beaten him and broken his teeth, etc.[262]

The subject is rather fully illustrated in the MS. _Omne Bonum_ (Royal 6 E. VI.) of the fourteenth century in the British Museum. At f. 295, under the title _Clericorum et mulierum cohabitatio_, is a quaint picture of a bishop parting a group of clergy from a group of women. At f. 296 _verso_, under the title _De clericis conjugatio_, is represented a group of clergy on the left, a group of women on the right, and a cradle containing a baby between the two groups; the text is on the penalties against clerical marriages, but it calls the women _uxores_--wives. Again, in the second volume of the work (Royal 6 E. VII.), at f. 138, under the title _Filii Presbyterum_, the picture shows three priests on the left, and women on the right, with three children kneeling between them; the text is on the disabilities of sons of priests.

* * * * *

Another branch of the same subject is the determination of the rulers of the Church that the sons of clerics should not be allowed to succeed to their fathers’ benefices. 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 end of this would have been that the benefices of the church would have become hereditary, impaired, and secularized.

How far the mischief had already gone is illustrated by two or three examples which we are able to quote.[263] In York, immediately after the Conquest, there was something very like a succession to the archbishopric. The provostship of Hexham descended from father to son, all of them being priests. The Deans of Whalley and Kettelwell, ecclesiastics of great jurisdiction and influence, were married, and their offices descended from father to son for generations. In the episcopal registers we find from time to time sons succeeding their fathers well on in the thirteenth century, notwithstanding the canons and synods which prohibited it.

The great act of defence against this danger which threatened was the canon which forbade the son of a parson to succeed to his father’s benefice. The canon was re-enacted from time to time, but not without occasional instances of strenuous resistance. Thus, in 1235, Alexander, Bishop of Coventry, complained to Pope Gregory IX., that certain rectors, sons of priests, presumed to occupy their fathers’ benefices by force of arms; and in some cases where fit incumbents had been placed, the priest’s sons had threatened them with injury to members and life, so that they feared to dwell there; and he asks the pope’s protection.[264] The pope tells him to deprive them of all their benefices.[265]

Some of the results of the state of things above described appear very frequently in the bishops’ registers. Illegitimacy, we have seen, was one of the defects which stood in the way of a man’s ordination, and the son of a priest was regarded by the canons as illegitimate; but the bishop could, if he pleased, give a dispensation which removed the barrier, and there are many records of such dispensations.[266] Sometimes the dispensation only admits the grantee to take minor orders, sometimes “to take all the sacred orders, and to hold ecclesiastical benefices even with cure of souls.” In the Register of Bishop Quivil, of Exeter, 1282, is a record of a _Dispensatio super defectu natalium_ granted to J. de Axemuthe, the defect being that he was _de presbytero genitus et soluta_. So, in the Exeter Register of Bishop Stapledon, J. de Hurbestone, clerk, in 1308, had a dispensation, being _de presbytero genitus et soluta_. _Soluta_ means single woman, but in the eye of the canon law and of the bishop, the wife of a priest would be _soluta_, so that these may be cases not of immorality, but of married priests. In the Register of Montacute, Bishop of Ely, is a record of a dispensation (1338) to the son of Ada Bray, of Canterbury, _qui patre de presbytero genitus_, to be promoted to all minor orders.[267] In a great number of cases the nature of the illegitimacy is _soluto genitus et soluta_--born of a single man and single woman; it is very possible that a number of sons of the clergy may be included in this formal legal description also.

Sometimes a man, refused perhaps by his own bishop, went to Rome for a dispensation, and obtained it.[268] Sometimes the Papal Court gave a priest’s son license to be promoted to any dignity _short of a bishopric_.[269]

If a man, being thus disqualified, neglected to obtain a proper dispensation, he might find the neglect a serious difficulty in after-life, or if he failed to have at hand the proof of his dispensation; thus, in 1234, it was objected to Thomas de Melsonby, prior of Durham, that he was the son of a rector of Melsonby, and born while his father was in holy orders.[270] Similarly on Feb. 20, 1308-9, Stapledon, bishop of Exeter, in the chapter-house of Launceston Priory, admonished the prior on pain of deprivation to exhibit, within two years, to himself or his successors, his “_Privilegium_” by virtue of which he retained the dignity, being illegitimate. He appeared within the term and satisfied the bishop, and was discharged.[271]

It appears that those who were thrust out on this ground were treated with some consideration. In 1126, Wm. de Ruley was deprived of the Church of Ruley, on the ground that he was the son of the last minister; but the archbishop assigned to him the tithes of a chapelry in the parish for his support during his life.[272] The mandate for the removal of Peter of Wivertorp from the Church of Wivertorp, for the same reason, concludes with the note, _salva pensione_, from which we infer that all incumbents removed for this cause were entitled to, or at least were usually granted, a pension. But Peter of Wivertorp did not rest content with his deprivation. He made friends at the Court of Rome, representing that his father was married when in minor orders, and that he himself had held the benefice for ten years; and obtained a letter from Pope Honorius interceding for him, that he should be allowed to retain Wivertorp till the archbishop gave him some other competent living.[273]

The curt, formal entries in these musty records sometimes seem to give us a glimpse into men’s hearts and lives: John Curteys, Vicar of Hobeche, in his will, made in 1418, leaves all his lands in Holbeach and Quappelode, to William Curteys for life, on condition that he shall become a priest as soon as possible after obtaining his legitimation, to celebrate for the souls of his parents; the remainder for pious uses.[274] We venture to conjecture that John Curteys, the vicar, in view of his approaching end, was uneasy in his conscience about the uncanonical marriage of which William was the offspring; therefore he thus appeals to his son to obtain as rapidly as may be a dispensation, and ordination to the priesthood; and then to use continually during his future life his priestly office in praying for the souls of his erring parents.

The author of “Piers Plowman’s Vision” includes these dispensations to priests’ sons, and sons of serfs, among the abuses of his time, in lines which are worth quoting--

For should no clerk be crowned,[275] But if he come were Of franklins and freemen, And of folk wedded. Bondmen[276] and bastards, And beggars’ children,[276] These belong to labour, And lord’s children should serve Both God and good men As their degree askith. Some to sing masses, Others to sit and write, Reade and receive, What Reason ought to spend. And since bondmen’s bairns Have been made bishops, And bastard bairns Have been archdeacons, And cobblers and their sons For silver have been knights, And monks and monials, That mendicants should feed,[277] Have made their kin knights, And knights’ fees purchased, Popes and Patrons Poor gentle blood refuse, And take Simond’s son, Sanctuary to keep. Life holiness and love Have been long hence, And will, till it be weared out Or otherwise ychanged.