pulous solitudes;" persons having now no other desire than to pass the time of their sojourning here in piety, in privacy, and in peace. This is a class to which it is impossible to refuse our sympathy, and whom it would be ungenerous and unjust to confound with the swarm of lazy, sensual, unlettered drones among whom it was their unhappy lot to live, and whom the shock of the Reformation dispersed. Exemption from episcopal visitation, and consequently from any inspection whatever, was the beginning of the evil. This privilege of the monasteries proved their poison: it was a short-sighted policy of the pope to hide them from the eye of the secular clergy, whose jealousy would have acted as a wholesome stimulant to the detection and correction of abuses. But the seculars he systematically slighted, and his iniquity eventually found him out. Then, again, came upon them an evil spirit which led them to grasp at the possession of all the benefices in the country. This was another effort to depress the working clergy, which the pope encouraged, but which, like the former, was, in the end, most injurious to his own authority, by bringing the clergy into contempt, and opening the eyes of the people, to the covetousness of the monks. The system of impropriations, which began with William the Conqueror, grew so rapidly that, in the course of three centuries, more than a third part of the benefices in England became such,* and those the richest, for the whiter the cow the surer was it to go to the altar, and by the time of the Reformation, there was added another third. An attempt was made by the legislature to stay the evil, and the statute of mortmain was passed in the reign of Edward I., whereby it was enacted, that "no person, religious or other, should presume to buy or sell, or under any colour of dona * Kennet on Impropriations, 25. + Ibid. 405. tion, lease, or other title, to receive any lands or tenements, or by any act of invention to appropriate them, under pain of forfeiture of them."* But the statute was evaded by royal dispensations, and the mischief grew. Even the pope himself took alarm (pavet ipse sacerdos); and Alexander, at the end of the twelfth century, writes to the Bishop of Worcester to admit no man to a vicarage on presentation of the monks, till they had assigned him, on the instant, such a portion of income as would suffice for the episcopal dues, and for the competent maintenance of the minister;† but this decree they set at naught by not presenting at all, either serving the churches by stipendiary curates, or (which was the readier way) leaving them altogether unserved.‡ By-and-by the example of the monasteries was followed by the chantries, colleges, hospitals, and nunneries; these, in their turn, learned the art of procuring impropriations;§ nay, even corporations, transforming themselves, by a legal fiction, into religious societies, did the same; for before King Henry VIII. there seems to have been no precedent in England for a mere layman to be an impropriator. The monks, however, had peculiar facilities for the accumulation of livings. Their influence with some neighbouring lord of a manor would often win him to make over the church on his estate, and the tithes with which it might be endowed, to their own abbey; they, meanwhile, undertaking to provide for the fulfilment of the ecclesiastical duties belonging to it. Then, again, if they could not beg they could buy, often the parish itself, as well as the benefice; or where the purchase was more circumscribed, the pope, ever their friend, would sometimes grant them the privilege of non-payment of tithes to the extent of such estate, to * Kennet on Impropriations, 97. + Ryves's Poore Vicar's Plea, 15. § Ibid. 7. Ibid. 21. ORIGIN OF vicarageS. 77 the great injury of the clergymen, when it happened to be considerable. Thus rectories were reduced to vicarages; the greater tithes going to the abbey fund, the small tithes left as a miserable stipend (often not more than a sixteenth part of the revenue of the benefice*) to the minister, who took the monks' labouring oar under the title of vicarius. Thus originated that divorce between the property of the parish church and the minister of it, which continues in most instances of vicarages to this day; and thus it came to pass that town livings (contrary to all reason) are at present of all others, the poorest, less than the usual pittance of endowment having been left to them by the considerate monks, who reckoned, and perhaps rightly reckoned, in the days when masses were said, that a large population would supply by fees alone an adequate provision for the vicar. Meanwhile, the people were disgusted with this gross and cruel invasion of the rights of their pastors; and the representatives of the monasteries read themselves in amidst reproaches loud and deep, of the bystanders. But they were not thin-skinned. They prepared, however, a sop for Cerberus, by exacting with little rigour the small tithes, or, in some cases, by accepting an easy composition instead of them; hoping, by such modus (decimandi) to purchase the more cheerful and prompt payment of the great tithes, which was their affair; and not at all uneasy because the propitiation happened to be made at the vicar's expense.‡ Their only remaining concern was to find some "Sir Johns" (as the poor clergy were called before the Reformation,) sometimes with an honourable adjunct of "lack Latin," or "mumble-matins," or "babbling Sir Johns,"¶ * Ryves's Poore Vicar's Plea, 145. + Monast. Anglic. i. 658. Kennet, 59. § Strype's Annals, 177. Latimer's Sermons, ii. 243 || Strype's Annals, 181. ¶ Wordsworth's Eccles. Biog. i. 265, note. or "blind Sir Johns,"* as it might be, who were just qualified according to the letter of the law, to stand in the gap; mass-priests, who could read their breviaries, and no more-for in those days men seem to have received ordination without any adequate examination either as to learning or character-persons of the lowest of the people, with all the gross habits of the class from which they sprung; loiterers on the ale-house bench;‡ dicers, scarce able to say by rote their Pater-noster, often actually unable to repeat the commandments;§ divines every way fitted to provoke the 75th canon, which was no doubt, in the first instance levelled against them. Such were the ministers to whom was consigned a very large proportion of the parishes of England before the Reformation; with what effect, the ignorance, the superstition, the vices which then spread themselves over the whole country, sufficiently testify. A feature or two of the times, such as have been preserved to us, are here offered to the reader, not, to be sure, always drawn by a very friendly hand, but still, in all probability, tolerably faithful. The prayers of the church, being in Latin, tended little or nothing to edification. Preaching there was scarce any. Quarterly sermons appear to have been prescribed to the clergy, but not to have been insisted upon; for though mass was on no account left unsaid for a single Sunday, sermons might be omitted for twenty Sundays together, and * Jewel's Sermon on Haggai. i. 2. + See Dean Colet's Serm. in Burnet's Reform. iii. 28. fol. The original Latin sermon is given in the appendix to Knight's Life of Colet. The passage alluded to is in p. 281. Strype's Cranmer, 456. § Ibid. 217, 218. Il Colet's Sermon, printed in 1511, speaks of law,-quæ prohibent ne clericus sit publicus lusor; and of laws, quæ prohibent clericis frequentare tabernas, 281. CHURCH BEFORE REFORMATION. 79 nobody be blamed.* The unpreaching prelate is honest Latimer's by-word. Indeed, as the Reformation approached, as the stirring of the foundations began to make itself felt; to be a preacher was to be suspected of being a heretic.t The friars, to be sure, were not dumb dogs, but they barked to little purpose, in a manner to prove rather that they were hungry than watchful; their discourses having for their object rather to fill their own wallets than satisfy their hearer's wants, and if not occupied with uncharitable invectives against other ecclesiastics, a tissue of fables and old wives' tales. Catechising, in the protestant sense of the term, was unknown or unpractised. When, indeed, it was perceived how powerful a weapon it was in the hands of the Reformers, steps were taken at the council of Trent for putting forth what was called a catechism. But the Trent catechism was composed avowedly for the instruction of the parish priests, not for the use of children, to whom it was not at all adapted; and, after all, the gross ignorance of the former must have made it a dead letter to most of them; utterly unintelligible so long as it remained in the learned language in which it was written, and if translated, (as it was, into Italian, French, German and Polish, whether into English we know not,) still containing too much special pleading, too obvious an anxiety for secular interests, too manifest an apprehension that the "craft was in danger," too much doubtful or ridiculous theology, to stand against the strong b'ows of the men of the new learning. The Church Catechism, on the other hand, writ in our own mother tongue, brief, and, on the whole, of admirable simplicity; a manual which, elementary as it may be thought, no competent judge can examine without seeing that its authors must * Latimer's Sermons, i. 182. + Ibid. 87. Burnet's Hist. of Reformation, i. 316. 1st ed. fol. |