CHAPTER XXIX.

GILDS.

The voluntary societies or fraternities called “gilds,” which were numerous all over Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, were established for mutual help and comfort in the various exigencies of life--in sickness, old age, poverty (if not the result of misconduct), in wrongful imprisonment, in losses by fire, water, or shipwreck.[560] So far it was a benefit club. But the gild had always a religious basis. It usually put itself under the name and protection of the Holy Trinity or of some saint. Once a year, at least, it took measures to have a special service held on its behalf in church, which all the members attended, habited in the livery of the gild; thence it proceeded to its hall or meeting-place for the annual business meeting; and afterwards held its annual feast. The mutual help and comfort embraced the spiritual side of life, and included mutual prayers for the living and the dead. Especially, the gild made much of the burial of its members, which was conducted with great solemnity; all the members were bound to attend the funeral; and provision was made for the continual offering of masses for the welfare of the living, and the repose of their departed brothers and sisters.[561]

The trade gilds had for their chief aim the regulation and protection of their particular trade; their laws included the regulation of freemen, apprentices, etc.; the quality, etc., of their goods; and constituted a trade monopoly. But the trade gild always embraced the usual social and religious features above mentioned.

The great trade gilds were often powerful and wealthy corporations; their members made bequests to them of lands and tenements; they used their commercial talent and ready money in making purchases of other property which added to their corporate wealth. They built handsome gild halls as the visible manifestation of their importance; all the members wore gowns of the same material, colour, and fashion; their officers, masters, and wardens were distinguished by great silver-gilt maces borne before them, and by chains and badges round their shoulders; they took pride in the splendour of their pageantry in the public processions and functions. They prided themselves also on the value of their plate, mostly gifts from their own members, or gifts from great persons; on the sumptuousness of their hospitality; and also on the useful institutions which they maintained--hospitals, schools, almshouses; on their gifts to the poor; and on their liberal contributions on great occasions of public need. Some of them had their own chapel, or at least constant special services in church, conducted by their own chaplain or chaplains.

Some of the gilds were organizations not so much for mutual benefit or the regulation of trade as for the foundation and conduct of enterprises for the benefit of the whole community; for promoting the glory of God, and increasing the number of services and the means of grace, for the population of the town; for founding a hospital or grammar school; for building and repairing bridges and highways, and the like.

The Gild at Ludlow had seven chaplains, and maintained also two deacons and four choristers to sing divine service in the parish church. It supported a grammar school, an almshouse for thirty-two poor people, and bestowed liberal gifts on the poor.

The Kalendar Gild of Bristol dated from before the Norman Conquest. In answer to inquiries made in 1387, the gild stated that in the twelfth century it had founded a school for Jews and others, to be brought up in Christianity, under the care of the said fraternity, which school it still maintained.[562]

At York there was a Gild of the Lord’s Prayer. It arose in this way: at some date unknown, but before the year 1387, a Miracle Play of the Lord’s Prayer had been performed in York, in which all manner of vices and sins were held up to scorn, and the virtues held up to praise. The play met with so great favour that a gild was founded for the purpose of keeping up the annual performance of the play. The gild had the usual charitable and religious features; but, besides, the members were bound to illustrate in their lives the scorn of vice and the praise of virtue, which were the objects of the play, and to shun company and business which were unworthy. The gild maintained a candelabrum of seven lights to hang in York Minster, to be lighted on all Sundays and feast days, in token of the seven supplications of the Lord’s Prayer, to the honour and glory of Almighty God, the Maker of that Prayer. And they maintained a tablet, showing the whole meaning and use of the Lord’s Prayer, hanging against a pillar of the minster, near the aforesaid candelabrum. Whenever the play was performed in York, the gild were to ride with the players through the principal streets, clad in one suit, and to keep order during the play.

The Corpus Christi Gild at York seems to have been founded by some of the clergy specially for the purpose of organizing a great annual function in honour of the Eucharist. On the day from which the gild took its name, a great procession was made through the streets of the city, headed by priests in surplices, and the six masters of the gild bearing white wands; the craft gilds of the city followed, exhibiting pageants. In 1415, ninety-six crafts took part in the procession, of which fifty-four exhibited pageants of subjects from the Bible, and ten carried torches. A great folio volume, now in the British Museum, contains the roll of its brethren and sisters, of all ranks, about 14,850 in number. The two gilds of St. Christopher and St. George, York, had a “Guylde Hall,” and maintained and repaired certain stone bridges and highways, and gave relief to certain poor people, but “had no spiritual promotion whereby the King should have firstfruits and tenths.”[563] The Earl and Countess of Northumberland were brother and sister of this gild, and their annual payment to it was 6_s._ 8_d._ each, and 6_s._ 8_d._ more for their livery.[564]

St. George’s Gild at Norwich, founded in 1385, in close connection with the corporation of the city, was another famous gild, numbering thousands of brethren and sisters, among them some of the East Anglian nobility. They had a stately equestrian procession, with pageants, on St. George’s Day.

Chaucer has not overlooked this feature of the social life of his period. Among the “Canterbury Pilgrims”--

An Haberdasher and a Carpenter, A Webber, a Dyer, and a Tapeser, Were all yclothed in o liverie Of a solempne, and grete fraternity.

In 1404 the Gild of the Holy Trinity was established in Worcester by Henry IV. The chantry which had been founded in the reign of Edward III. was slightly altered from its original purpose; a perpetual chantry of three monks was appointed to sing masses for the soul of Henry, while the priest of the original foundation was required to assist the parson and curator of the parish church, “because it doth abound in houseling people,” as well as to sing mass at his own altar.[565]

The bailiffs and commonalty of Birmingham in 1392, on the basis of a chantry originally founded in the time of Henry II., founded the Gild of the Holy Cross, with chaplains to celebrate Divine service in the Church of St. Martin, for the town contained two thousand houseling people; to keep in repair two great stone bridges and divers foul and dangerous ways; to maintain almshouses for twelve poor persons, and other charities. It built a great public hall, which was called indifferently the Town Hall or the Gild Hall.[566]

We find in the “Calendar of Chantries,” etc., and also in the “Valor Ecclesiasticus,” a number of endowed “services,” under the same kind of saintly designation as the chantries, _e.g._ our Lady’s Service, St. Anne’s, St. Catherine’s, St. John’s, the Rood, Trinity, etc.; sometimes, also, like some of the chantries, they are recorded under a surname, which it seems probable was that of the founder, as _e.g._ at Bristol, William’s Service, Foster’s, Pollard’s, Jones’s, Henry’s, Forthey’s.

The payment for these services seems usually to have come through the hands of a warden or of feoffees, and we suppose that they were usually maintained by a gild or fraternity.

At Our Lady’s altar in Rotherham Church, “divers well-disposed persons” founded a chaplaincy to sing “mass of Our Lady every Saturday at eight o’clock.” The Rood Chantry in Skipton Church was founded for a priest to say mass “every day when he is disposed” (does not that mean when he is not, as we say, indisposed, _i.e._ when he is not hindered by sickness?), “at six in summer and seven in winter, for the purpose that as well the inhabitants of the town as Kendal men and strangers should hear the same.”

The mayor and his brethren at Pontefract provided a chaplain to survey the amending of the highways, and to say the “morrow mass,” which was over by 5 a.m. Also a chaplain of Our Lady to say mass at 8 a.m., and another in the chantry of Our Lady in St. Giles’s Chapel-of-ease there, to sing mass daily “for the ease of the inhabitants.” There was also a “Rushworth chaplain” at St. Thomas’s Chantry, in the parish church.

In Wakefield Church the parishioners ordained a “morrow mass” at 5 a.m. for all servants and labourers in the parish.

There was a strong likeness between chantries and services; but while the chief object of a chantry was to obtain prayers for the departed, and it was only incidentally that it supplied additional opportunities of Divine worship, the service seems to have been intended specially to maintain an additional and probably a grander public service for the glory of God and the help of the spiritual life of the inhabitants of a parish or town, while prayers for the founders and benefactors were only a minor incident of the foundation. Here are a few notes on the stipends of the chaplains, the hire of chapels for the services, etc.

In the “Calendar of Chantries,” etc., there are recorded 107 services, of which 64 are in Gloucestershire, 12 in Herefordshire, 7 in Chester, 5 in Yorkshire, 4 in Shropshire, 3 in Derbyshire, 2 in Staffordshire, and 2 in Somerset, 1 each in Dorset, Durham, Essex, and Wilts, and 4 in Wales. There are a few entries of “Stipendiaries of our Lady,” who were probably priests serving “Services of our Lady.”

There was a service in the parish church of St. Ellen, Worcester; the chaplain “_exercens_” the “_servicium_” of the Blessed Virgin there received by the hands of the wardens of the said “_servicium_,” 45_s._, and he received 75_s._ more from the benevolence and charity of the parishioners there. In the same church was a Service of St. Katharine, for “_exercens_” which the chaplain received from the wardens a clear stipend of £5 1_s._ 11½_d._[567]

The Vicar of Cirencester received payments from the Feoffees of the service of the Name of Jesus for the use of a chapel, £6; from the wardens of the service of St. Christopher, for the use of a chapel, £6 0_s._ 5_d._; from the Feoffees of the Fraternity of St. Katharine, 9_s._ 9_d._; and from the Feoffees of the Fraternity of St. John Baptist, 17_s._ We have already seen in the chapter on Chantries,[568] that in villages the people sometimes provided services for themselves, which might be classed with these.

In the fifteenth century every market town had one or more gilds,[569] not necessarily with the costly adjuncts of a hall for their meetings, and a chaplain and services of their own in church, but each with its charities, and social customs, and always with its annual service and festival. Even in many villages and rural parishes a gild helped to draw neighbours together into friendly association, organized their charities, and stimulated their village festivities. Even the humblest of them had its little fund, formed by the annual subscriptions of the members, and perhaps a little “stock”[570] of a few cows or sheep fed on the common pasture, the profit of which swelled the common fund of the gild, out of which they helped a member in a strait, and gave alms to their poor. They made much of the funerals of their departed members, following them in a long procession. The humblest had a few cooking utensils, and pots, and pans, and pewter dishes and plates[571] for their convivial meetings, and perhaps a mazer with a silver rim as the loving cup, out of which they drank to one another’s health and prosperity; and on their annual feast day the vicar said a special mass for them, and preached them a sermon.

The suppression of all these gilds on the pretext of their prayers for their deceased members, and the confiscation of their property (except in London, whose great Trading Gilds were too powerful to be meddled with), was the very meanest and most inexcusable of the plunderings which threw discredit upon the Reformation.

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We have some general reflections to make on these three chapters on Domestic Chaplains, Chantries, and Gilds.

The appropriation of so many parochial benefices to the religious houses in the twelfth century had greatly reduced the provision for the parochial clergy on whom the burden of the parochial care of the people rested. The institution during the thirteenth century of vicars in the appropriated parishes, with perpetuity of tenure, fixed endowment, and responsibility to the bishop, had done something to alleviate the evil. The institution of the orders of friars in the same thirteenth century had effected a great revival of religion; and when the work of the new order had settled down to its normal level it still supplied a valuable auxiliary of religion among the lower classes of the population. By the end of the thirteenth century things had settled down. Very few new monasteries were founded after the twelfth century; very few friaries after the thirteenth century.

Of the rural benefices many were in the hands of rectors in minor orders who employed chaplains at such stipends as they could agree with them to accept. Many in the hands of absentee and pluralist rectors were similarly served by parish chaplains. The remainder were served by vicars whose endowments we have seen were small. The natural result of such a state of things must have been that a great proportion of the rural parishes were taught and tended by vicars and parish chaplains who might be good men, doing their duty to the best of their ability, but not always men of the breeding and learning which would make them very suitable pastors for the country gentry and their families. It seems probable that, in the fashion which sprung up among the country gentry at the close of the thirteenth century, and continued through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of founding chantries, and entertaining domestic chaplains, the gentry were seeking to provide for themselves and their families additional and sometimes more acceptable spiritual teachers and guides. A wealthy lord sometimes met the difficulty by converting the parish church into a collegiate church, with a considerable clerical staff adequately endowed.

In the ancient towns, we have seen the parishes were small and their endowments miserable. In the more modern towns, which had grown into great towns, with the general increase of the population and its tendency then, as now, to gravitate into the towns, the one vicar of the one parish church was often quite unable to cope with the spiritual needs of a large and difficult flock; and the townspeople themselves sometimes made better provision for their own spiritual needs. The gilds, which provided two or three or half a dozen chaplains with singing boys to conduct service in the parish church, were clearly providing for a more dignified service for the honour of God than the vicar and his clerk could offer; the _Servicia_ called by the name of this and that saint, seem to have been intended to multiply the number of services for the greater convenience of the people. The gild chaplains would certainly be expected to undertake special personal ministrations--without infringing on the legal rights of the vicar--to the brothers and sisters of their gild. It is very interesting to see that the people thus set themselves to supplement the deficiencies of the ecclesiastical organization, by providing for their own spiritual needs. It reminds us of the way in which, in more modern times, earnest people supplied the deficiencies in the supply of their spiritual cravings by holding “prophecyings” in the time of Elizabeth, and by the foundation of lectureships in the parish churches in the time of the Georges.