THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 ARCADY : for Better, for Worse, By the Rev. 
 
 Uootor Ji.s-soi'P. Fourlli Edition. Crown Svo, liiiJi) 
 cloth, silic sewn, 3s. 6d. 
 
 THE COMING OF THE FRIARS, and other 
 
 Medieval Sketches. IJy tlic Kcv. Doctoi Jkskoci". Sixth 
 lidition. Crown Svo, limp cloth, silk sewn. 3s. del. 
 
 RANDOM ROAMING, and other Papers. With 
 I'urtrait. liy the Kcv. Doctor JessOPP. Second and 
 Cheaper Edition. Crown Svo, limp cloth, sill; sewn, 3s. 6d. 
 
 STUDIES BY A RECLUSE: In Cloister, 
 
 Town, and Country. iJy tlie Kev. Doctor Jlissopp. 
 Second Edition. Crown Svo, limp cloth, silk sewn, 3s. 6d. 
 
 THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON : 
 
 Some l-'uf^itive Papers. liy the Kev. Doctnr jKssopp. 
 Third Edition. Crown Svo, limp cloth, silk sewn, '3s. Cxi. 
 
 FRIVOLA. By the Rev. Doctor Jessopp, Crown 
 
 hvo, ciolh, 3s. 6(1. 
 
 T. FISHER UWVIX, P.\TEKXOSTER SQU.\RE, EC.
 
 Before the Great Pillage 
 
 iUBHb i>tt)et a^iscellantcs 
 
 BY 
 
 AUGUSTUS JESSOPP, D.D., 
 
 RECTOR OF SCARXIXG 
 
 Honorary Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge 
 Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford 
 Honorary Canon in the Cathedral of Xorwieh 
 
 SECOND IMPRESSION 
 
 XonOon 
 T. FISHER UNVVIN 
 
 I'ATEKNOSTER SQUARE 
 1901
 
 [All rights reserved.)
 
 DA 
 
 176 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE GREAT 
 
 PILLAGE (Part I.). , . , .3 
 
 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE GREAT 
 
 PILLAGE (Part II.) . . . -35 
 
 II 
 
 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE 
 
 REFORMATION . . . . '75 
 
 III 
 
 "robbing god" . . . . .123 
 
 IV 
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES .... 147 
 
 V 
 
 
 0000 crfi
 
 vi CONTENTS 
 
 V 
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 VI 
 
 DAVID AND JONATHAN 
 
 ADAM AND EVE 
 
 cu cu ! 
 
 VII 
 
 VIII 
 
 • « 
 
 IX 
 
 MOLES . . t 
 
 « « 
 
 • « 
 
 • * 
 
 PAGB 
 
 . '83 
 
 • 
 
 • • 
 
 221 
 
 231 
 
 239 
 
 249
 
 PREFACE 
 
 T ^ THEN, some twenty years ago, the country 
 ' ^ living which I now hold was offered me by 
 the kind friend to whom the patronage belonged, I 
 accepted it with little hesitation, and I did so with 
 my eyes open and not without counting the cost. 
 I knew that in joining the ranks of the country 
 clergy I was burning my ships and that there was 
 no professional future before me. 
 
 1 have never regretted my decision. I have 
 found an abiding joy and pride in doing my best 
 for my people and studying them and their ways in 
 the present, while trying to learn something about 
 their forefathers and their ways in the past.
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 In my first volume — entitled Arcadyy for better 
 for ivorse — I gave the world the result of my 
 observations upon men and things as I found 
 them. I believe it was and is a faithful picture ; 
 but there was nothing retrospective in it reaching 
 further back than the first half of the eighteenth 
 century. 
 
 It so happened, however, that certain antiquarian 
 tastes, which were born with me, led me into 
 researches here and there which appeared to me 
 to throw some new light upon mediaeval history. 
 
 The discovery of the immense body of direct 
 evidence which the Manor Court Rolls afford 
 regarding the incidence of the great plague of 1349 ; 
 the study of the Rougham charters, which yielded 
 such a minute insight into the life of a village 
 community in the thirteenth century ; and the 
 extraordinary find of a prosperous country parson's 
 annual audit for the year ending Michaelmas, 1306,^ 
 were instances of the fact that even in History there 
 
 • The first two of these papers are printed in my Coming of 
 the Friars; the third in Random Roamings.
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 are still many discoveries to be made, and also that 
 some men are curiously fortunate in their finds. 
 
 The essays in the present volume on Parish Life, 
 as distinct from village life, and on the Parish 
 Priest, as distinct from the country parson, are 
 in great measure supplementary to or elucidatory 
 of the earlier papers referred to. If it were at all 
 probable that a re-arrangement of my writings 
 should be undertaken, I should like to see these 
 five or six papers on Mediaeval Parish history 
 published in a volume by themselves, so only that 
 I were permitted to add two more contributions 
 on the same lines of research, supplementary to 
 these earlier ones. 
 
 To some readers the attempt to deal with the 
 Baptism of Clovis may appear out of place in 
 a volume so English as this is. Nevertheless, I 
 am sure that there are others who will readily 
 understand why this essay should be found in 
 such company. P'or the student of English Origins 
 when confronted by the thick darkness, say, of the 
 fifth century, often finds himself mastered by a
 
 X PREFACE 
 
 kind of passionate impatience to break away from it 
 and to get into the light again — anyhow — anywhere. 
 "I can find nothing," he says to himself, "about 
 what was passing here when the Roman legions 
 deserted our island ; let me follow if I can for a 
 while, the movements of those fierce barbarian hosts, 
 never at rest, a day's sail from our own coast line ! " 
 And so the historic instinct leads him to widen 
 his purview, and mental refreshment comes which 
 brings with it clearer vision and a profounder 
 appreciation of the unity of history. 
 
 As to the other trifles in the book, they must 
 apologise for themselves.
 
 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND BEFORE 
 THE GREAT PILLAGE
 
 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 
 
 I 
 
 WHEN the results of the Great Inquest, 
 commonly known as the Domesday Book, 
 were handed in to William the Conqueror in 1086, 
 this island had in the thousand years preceding that 
 great event suffered three conquests. That is, the 
 land and the people inhabiting it had been passed 
 over to the sway and dominion of three successive 
 masters. 
 
 The first conquest was that by the Romans, who 
 held the whole island from the Firth of Forth to the 
 Channel. Their rule lasted, roughly speaking, for 
 four centuries, and they abandoned the province of 
 Britain at the beginning of the fifth century of our 
 era, leaving the luckless people to take care of them- 
 selves. 
 
 The second conquest was that effected by the
 
 4 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 Saxons and Angles — the English folk, if you prefer 
 it — whose rule, at its widest, extended over pretty 
 much the same stretch of territory as the Romans 
 had brought under their obedience, with the 
 exception of the Principality of Wales and the 
 north-western district known as Strathclyde. The 
 Saxons took another six centuries to consolidate the 
 kingdoms they had won, and during the last two of 
 those centuries they had hard work to hold their 
 own against the Danes, who were trying to super- 
 sede them. 
 
 Finally, the Normans under their great Duke 
 William got their firm footing here ; they were the 
 last successful invaders of our fatherland. They 
 won it literally by the sword, held it by the sword, 
 and in less than twenty years the Conqueror proved 
 how thoroughly he had made England into a 
 kingdom under a single master by the carrying out 
 of that magnificent survey to which allusion has 
 been made. 
 
 It was not till more than 700 years had gone 
 by since its compilation, that the Domesday Book 
 was printed, and only during the reign of Her 
 Majesty Queen Victoria has this unique document 
 been subjected to the minute and scholarly scrutiny 
 which it so well deserves, and which is being 
 bestowed upon it.
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 5 
 
 In the Domesday Book there is so much that 
 affords a basis of certainty from which inquiries 
 may be pushed forward into many unsolved 
 problems of history, that it is not to be wondered 
 at if the students of origins, and enthusiastic in- 
 quirers into the beginnings of our institutions 
 should be found embracing very different views 
 on the questions that have arisen and still remain 
 to be answered finally. Any man less than a 
 specialist, and a specialist fully equipped for the 
 work, would be guilty of immense presumption 
 in pronouncing an opinion, and still more so if 
 he expressed himself as a dogmatist, upon the points 
 now under discussion among some of the ablest and 
 keenest intellects in Europe. But we can hardly be 
 wrong in saying that tiie main questions which are 
 now occupying the attention of experts resolve 
 themselves into these : first, What did the several 
 conquerors — Roman, Saxon, and Norman — find 
 here when they settled among us ? and, secondly, 
 What did they do for the nation they subdued ? 
 
 The difficulty of dealing with these two questions 
 in the case of the Roman occupation is rendered 
 almost insuperable, because it seems certain that 
 before the coming of the Romans there never had 
 been anything approaching to a united England. 
 We have to take into account differences of race
 
 6 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 and differences in civilisation, which render it 
 impossible for us to make any generalisations that 
 can be relied on. Thus much, however, may be 
 safely afhrmed : that our Roman conquerors did 
 find organised communities, settled in defined areas, 
 and probably differing in their constitution very 
 widely according as they were met with in the east 
 or the west, the north or the south. It is probable 
 that, with the wisdom which characterised their 
 foreign policy, the Romans did just what our 
 English rulers in India did, and are still doing — 
 i.e., they left the old areas, whether of the " village 
 community" or any other organised social or 
 political unit, as little disturbed as possible ; they 
 left the people such self-government as they had 
 attained to. There is no evidence of such a clean 
 sweep of old laws, and old sentiments, and old 
 judicial procedure (if one may use the term) as was 
 made in Ireland by the English conquerors when 
 they suppressed the Brehon laws in that unhappy 
 island. The result was that when the next con- 
 querors took possession of the land they must have 
 found a number of survivals in the social, political, 
 and economical condition of different parts of the 
 country. But it is difficult to believe that the 
 centralising instincts of Rome did not impose upon 
 the subject population some form of coercive 
 
 i
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 7 
 
 administration which, while leaving to the mixed 
 people, passing under the name of Britons, a certain 
 measure of self-government, superadded thereto 
 some machinery for dealing out even justice as 
 between man and man, such as might afford 
 security for the lives and property of all subjects 
 of the Roman Empire. How that machinery 
 worked in detail we shall never know, but that 
 it must have been carried on in certain definite 
 geographical areas we can hardly help assuming. 
 It will go some way towards helping us to a co- 
 herent theory if we take it for granted that what 
 Professor Maitland calls the geographical unit of the 
 Conqueror's survey, namely the vil, was of Roman 
 origin ; that it was in the main identical with what 
 the Saxon folk called the /////, the town, or the 
 township ; and that the dwellers in that area were 
 by those same Saxons organised into a community, 
 presided over by the reeve, an official with fiscal 
 as well as judicial duties to discharge. 
 
 When the Normans came in they found the vils 
 or townships still enjoying a certain measure of self- 
 government. It was the policy of the new con- 
 querors to substitute for this the government by 
 a lord over the inhabitants of the old area, the lord 
 to be responsible to the sovereign for the taxes 
 levied from the community, and the inhabitants
 
 8 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 of the area being bound to render allegiance, service 
 and tribute to the lord, who was their master and 
 (/»<is/-chieftain. When this came to pass the vil of 
 the Romans had passed out of the stage of being 
 tlie ioic'iisliip of the Saxons, and had become the 
 manor of the Norman rulers. The change was 
 gradual, and it must not be supposed that it was 
 effected by some coup dc main, so that every vil 
 became at once a manor, or that every manor 
 constituted a vil. All that can be said seems to be 
 that in the course of a century or so the manorial 
 system, as it is called, became dominant, and that, as 
 a rule, over that geographical area which constituted 
 the Roman vil and the Saxon township the lords of 
 the manors were petty kings, exercising authority, 
 exacting homage, and imposing burdens on their 
 " tenants," i.e., on the inhabitants of the old town- 
 ships. 
 
 But long before this great revolution had come 
 about a much greater revolution had taken effect 
 up and down the length and breadth of the land. 
 When Rome loosened her hold of Britain, Christianity 
 was the established religion of the empire, and 
 Britain was in some sense or other a Christian 
 land. It was that or nothing. Two centuries later 
 the Saxons had almost as effectually blotted out 
 any organised Christian Church, in the eastern half
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 9 
 
 at least, of Britain, as the Moslems, a century later, 
 had blotted it out in North Africa, Asia Minor, and 
 Palestine. Then came the new era, the prodigious 
 awakening, and before the seventh century closed, 
 Britain was a Christian land once more. 
 
 A momentous change ensued. How it was 
 brought about at all, again it may be said, we 
 shall never know ; but that, during the Saxon 
 occupation, the geographical areas of the town- 
 ships up and down the land became little 
 territories subject to the rule and influence of 
 another functionary — this time not a political, 
 but a religious, personage — to wit, the priest ; and 
 that the priest exercised a very real and sub- 
 stantial authority over the community inhabiting 
 the area of the township or the vil, admits of no 
 question. That it was Archbishop Theodore who, 
 in the seventh century, " divided England into 
 parishes " is a mere fable ; but the fact remains 
 that, however slowly or however gradually, it came 
 about at last, every geographical area, whether 
 occupied by a community of co-operative Socialists— 
 \ for it really amounted to that — or occupied by a com- 
 munity with a constitution, which may be said to be 
 that of a limited monarchy on a small scale, became 
 also the home of a community which in religious 
 matters was brought under the rule of an ecclesiastical
 
 10 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 Rccior as he was in fact, and as lie got to be called. 
 When this had come about the vil or the town- 
 ship, without ceasing to be either the one or the 
 other, became at the same time the priest's domain ; 
 and whatever designation the area might receive 
 viewed as a poHtical unit, it was henceforth called 
 the parisJi, and the people living in that area, of 
 whatever status, condition, or degree, became his 
 parishioners. As such they were members of a 
 community over which no lord of the manor nor 
 any other political magnate, had any sort of 
 authority ; in matters religious and ecclesiastical 
 these personages had not a word to say. 
 
 The word Parish indicated originally the geo- 
 graphical area over which the jurisdiction of a 
 BisJiop extended. It was not till a later time, and 
 when that area had been subdivided into smaller 
 areas, each of which was committed to the over- 
 sight of a priest, responsible for such functions as 
 only a priest could discharge, that the smaller area 
 got to be called the parish, while the larger area, 
 comprehending an aggregate of parishes, was called 
 the bishop's diocese. As time went on, by a con- 
 fusion in language of which abundant examples 
 might be given, the name, which was strictly a 
 designation of the geographical area, got to be 
 applied to the community inhabiting that area j and
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE ii 
 
 thus the word parish is, even in our own days, used 
 sometimes to indicate the area inhabited by the 
 community, and sometimes the community itself. 
 
 In the latter sense the parish was a purely religious 
 organisation, distinct in its origin, its working, and 
 its aims from the manor, the township, or the 
 tithing, though composed of the same personnel, man 
 for man, ''The parish was the community of the 
 township organised for Church purposes and sub- 
 ject to Church discipline, with a constitution which 
 recognised the rights of the whole body as an 
 aggregate, and the right of every adult member, 
 whether man or ivoinan, to a voice in self-govern- 
 ment, but at the same time kept the self-governing 
 community under a system of inspection and 
 restraint by a central authority outside the parish 
 boundaries." ^ 
 
 The community had its own assembly — the parish 
 meeting — which was a deliberative assembly. It 
 had its own ofiicers, who might be either men or 
 women, duly elected, sometimes for a year, some- 
 times for life, but in all cases subject to being 
 dismissed for flagrant offences. The larger number 
 of these officials had well-defined duties to discharge, 
 and were paid for their services out of funds pro- 
 
 ' Bishop Ilobhousc, in "Somerset Record Society," vol. iv. 
 Preface, p. ix.
 
 12 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 vidcd by the parishioners. The finance of the 
 parish presents some ditticulty ; but a strict account 
 was kept of all moneys received and paid, and the 
 balance-sheet laid before the annual meeting of the 
 community assembled in the nave of the church, 
 where a kind of audit was held and discussion 
 ensued upon such measures as were of serious 
 importance and concern to the whole body of the 
 parishioners. 
 
 The president or chairman of the church council 
 or parish meeting was the rector of the parish or 
 his deputy ; but he was by no means a " lord over 
 God's heritage." There is no evidence — but quite 
 the contrary — to show that he initiated to any great 
 extent the subjects of debate ; and the income raised 
 for parish purposes, which not infrequently was 
 considerable, was not under his control, nor did it 
 pass through his hands. 
 
 The trustees for the parish property and the 
 responsible representatives of the parish were the 
 churchwardens, who were very rarely less than two 
 in number ; and in the case of the larger parishes 
 they had assessors, who shared with them the bur- 
 dens and the responsibilities of duties which were 
 not seldom irksome. The wardens were elected 
 annually. The oftice was an honorary one, and 
 often entailed some risk and expense.
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 13 
 
 The permanent officials of the parish, beginning at 
 the parish clerk, the grave-digger, watchman, keeper 
 of the processional cross, and others who, for the 
 present at any rate, need not be specified, ivcre thepaid 
 seirants of the parish. They were in no sense the 
 nominees or subordinates of the rector ; they were 
 supported by the parishioners, and removable, when 
 removable at all, by the parishioners, who presented 
 the offender to the rural dean, from whom an appeal 
 lay to the archdeacon ; and occasionally such an 
 appeal might be carried to the bishop, whose 
 decision was final. 
 
 The property belonging to the parishes during 
 the centuries before the great spoliation was enor- 
 mous, and was always growing. It consisted of 
 houses and lands ; of flocks and herds ; of precious 
 jewels and costly vessels of silver and gold ; of 
 ornaments and church furniture ; of bells and 
 candlesticks, crosses and organs, and tapestry and 
 banners ; of vestments which were miracles of 
 splendour in their colours and materials and in- 
 comparable artistic finish of needlework ; not to 
 speak of the fine linen and the veils, the carpets and 
 the hangings ; and last, not least, the service-books, 
 which were continually needing to he mended, 
 bound, or replaced by new copies, and that at a 
 cost which we moderns even now find it difficult 
 to accept as credible.
 
 14 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 All lliis immense accumulation of treasure and 
 wealth was strictly the property of the parish, and 
 was held, as I have said, in trust for the community 
 by the churchwardens, elected in the assembly of 
 the church council or parish meeting. In the 
 Record Ot'lice there is one most precious manu- 
 script, which contains a minute account of the 
 contents of every church in the Archdeaconry of 
 Norwich in the year 1368. It is, in fact, a return 
 of parish property to be found in the churches of 
 the Archdeaconry during that year. For years I 
 have been continually worried and consumed by 
 the desire to have that manuscript transcribed and 
 printed — a manuscript which would be hailed by 
 wise men as one of the most valuable contributions 
 to parochial history which has ever been made 
 public. But, alas ! this is a wicked world, and I 
 have never been able to find the money to pay for 
 transcribing and publishing, for the benefit of a 
 favoured few, this deeply interesting record ; and 
 this generation has gone mad on bicycles and other 
 vanities, and has no money to spare for more 
 desirable and less dangerous amusements. And so 
 poor men, whose crime is that they love to peer 
 into the past — a crime that is quite unpardonable, 
 because it is so ridiculously useless — such poor men 
 are kept a great deal too short of the ways and means
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 15 
 
 to allow of their indulging in a hobby whereby their 
 fellow-creatures would be greatly benefited, if only 
 they could be taught to see that the past — even the 
 queer old crumpled-up past — has something to 
 teach the present, for all the self-complacency 
 which contributes to make the aforesaid present so 
 cheerful and so proud. ^ 
 
 Now it must be understood that all this enormous 
 amount of property (which if it were in existence 
 now and were brought to the hammer would repre- 
 sent a gross value of several millions of pounds 
 sterling) belonged to the parishes. It no more 
 belonged to the clergy, the parsons, the parish 
 priests, than it belonged to the lords of the manors. 
 Hundreds of the vestments and ornaments are 
 expressly set down in these inventories as having 
 been presented by the officiating clergy themselves : 
 presented, i.e., to the parishioners, and passing 
 over to the parishioners as parish property — the 
 
 ' A few daj's after this paper appeared in print it was my 
 liappincss to receive a letter from a lady, tiien an entire 
 stranger to mc, offering to defray the expense of transcribing 
 the MS. referred to in the text. A week later came a similar 
 offer of a very liberal contribution towards the cost of printing 
 the work which, from its nature, could never pay its expenses 
 if thrown upon the market. The task of editing it is neces- 
 sarily very laborious, and some time must elapse before the 
 volume can be issued from tlic press.
 
 i6 PARrsn LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 parishioners, who had the li^ht of custody of 
 that property and the power, witliin certain hmits, 
 of deaHng witli it as parish property. 
 
 And this property was, as I have said, always 
 growing and increasing in vahie. It was rare — very 
 rare — for any man or woman of substance enough 
 to make a will to forget to leave some sort of legacy 
 to the parish, i.e., to the community assembling in 
 the church. Those legacies varied greatly, accord- 
 ing to the wealth or poverty of the testators. Very 
 common were the bequests of a poor widow's 
 wedding-ring. Never a year passed without the 
 parish accounts showing that articles of dress, brass 
 pots, lamps, candlesticks, honey, wax, were left by 
 the poorest ; sheep and cattle and lands, great 
 goblets, and occasionally considerable sums of 
 money, being bequeathed by the well-to-do. The 
 churchwardens, when at the end of the year they 
 went out of oflice, were required to hand in a strict 
 account for every pennyworth they had received. 
 They set down what this or that article had been 
 sold for — the rings, the kettles, the brooches, the 
 cups — the rents received for the houses, lands, or 
 for the use of the flocks and herds ; and per contra 
 they told what expenses they had been put to, and 
 they finished up the account by showing the balance, 
 whether in money or goods, which they handed
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 17 
 
 over to those who succeeded them in their office. 
 This brings me to the question what those expenses 
 were. 
 
 First and foremost, and of course by far the 
 largest portion of the expenditure, was that which 
 the maintenance of the fabric of the church and the 
 conduct of the worship in the church entailed. 
 
 As to the fabric, again, it must be borne in mind 
 that it was the property of the parish. There are 
 two most mischievous and widespread mistakes, 
 which people have been making and repeating 
 for the last two or three centuries, with regard 
 to the building of the parish churches in England, 
 which I am never tired of protesting against. The 
 first is the stupid and ignorant assertion that the 
 monks built our parish churches. 
 
 It is impossible to enter into the matter here. 
 But it would be not a whit more absurd and non- 
 sensical to say that the wonderful amount of money 
 spent upon the rebuilding and restoration of our 
 parish churches during the last fifty years had been 
 contributed in the main by Nonconformists, than to 
 say that the monastic bodies built the parish churches 
 in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. It is 
 hardly too much to say that from some points of 
 view the monastic bodies were themselves noncon- 
 formists. The monster grievance against which 
 
 3
 
 1 8 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 the beneficed clergy had to complain and which 
 thousands of parishes in England to this day have 
 to complain of, was and is that the monasteries 
 robbed the parishes of their endowments ; and as 
 for building churches for any one except themselves, 
 they were about as likely to build them as to build 
 cavalry barracks 1 
 
 The second delusion — a delusion almost more 
 widespread than the other — is that the squires built 
 the churches. In the thirteenth and fourteenth 
 centuries there d'cre no squires — that is the naked 
 truth. In the great majority of country places 
 there were no wealthy men to be found. The 
 country gentleman, as we understand the term now, 
 was a creature hardly known ; he had hardly come 
 into existence. Take note of that, you young men 
 and maidens with a taste for historical research, and 
 spend the next year or two in proving that I am 
 wrong, or in satisfying yourselves that I am right. 
 Correct me or confirm me. 
 
 Who did build the churches, then ? The parishes 
 built the churches, and the parishes in all cases kept 
 them in repair. In the fourteenth century it was far, 
 far more rare for a church to be built by some rich 
 man than it is now, just because the number of rich 
 men in the country was incomparably fewer than 
 Iheir number is to-day. But as to keeping the
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 19 
 
 churches in repair, the parish had no choice in the 
 matter. The bishops and the archdeacons were 
 always looking after the parishioners. The 
 episcopal registers are full of instances of churches 
 that are ordered to be enlarged, re-roofed, reglazed, 
 rebuilt, after a fire or after being struck by lightning. 
 The work is ordered to be done by a certain date, 
 and in a manner to satisfy the requirements of the 
 said archdeacons, who stood to the parishioners 
 almost exactly in the same relation as H.M. 
 Inspectors do to the wretched inhabitants of a 
 district which is required to build a school, add on 
 a class-room, satisfy the requirements of the last 
 Code, and provide a new playground, a new floor, 
 new apparatus, new everything — and who do it, too, 
 to the amazement of themselves and their neigbours, 
 and who most wonderfully find the money (though 
 where it comes from in a thousand instances it 
 would take all the ingenuity of man or the beasts of 
 the field to explain), till the thing is actually done, 
 and then everybody is pleased, and they begin to 
 boast of the excellence of the school which they have 
 provided for themselves ! 
 
 When a man first comes to look into the injunc- 
 tions laid upon all sorts of poor little places to build, 
 to alter, to make additions to the churches, which 
 are to be found in the bishops' registers, his hair
 
 20 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 almost stands on end. He is tempted to exclaim, 
 " The people couldn't do it I Why, a seven-shilling 
 rate in the pound for three years would not pay for 
 it ! They couldn't do it ! " By and by he is com- 
 pelled to exclaim again, " They couldn't do it — but 
 they did it for all that ! " And when they had done 
 it — built their church, added a tower, then a spire, 
 then an aisle, then a side-chapel or two — then they 
 became so proud of their own achievements and 
 were so delighted with their churches that they made 
 up their minds to get all they could out of their 
 churches. 
 
 And thus it came to pass that all that was joyous 
 and gay in their lives, all that was beautiful and 
 ennobling, all that was happy in their recollections, 
 all that was best in what they imagined, all that was 
 elevating in their dreams and their hopes and their 
 aspirations — all came to them from the influence 
 which their churches exercised upon them. The 
 dreary round of toil, from which they could not 
 escape ; the staggering behind the bullocks that 
 dragged the plough through the furrows; the hovels 
 in which they huddled — such hovels as you may see 
 to-day in the clachans of the Highlands — where the 
 smoke from the smouldering fire escaped through 
 a hole in the roof ; the coarse food, that at 
 best brought them satiety without satisfaction ;
 
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 2i 
 
 the enforced labour ; the aimless, purposeless 
 monotony — 
 
 The long mechanic pacings to and fro, 
 The set grey life and apathetic end ; 
 
 — what charm, what hope, what incentive to 
 honourable ambition could all this afford ? 
 
 If it had not been for the other side of the picture 
 — for the blessed relief and the utter change in their 
 surroundings which the churches afforded to the 
 villages of the fourteenth century — the people 
 must infallibly have become more brutal, stupid, 
 sodden, and cruel with every successive generation, 
 as some theorists have maintained that the Anglo- 
 Saxon invaders were in process of becoming during 
 the five centuries of their occupation — five centuries, 
 after all that can be said on the other side, which 
 were centuries of fearfully slow progress, till the 
 Norman Conquest came upon them with a thousand 
 new refinements and a thousand new interests, and 
 the revelation of a new horizon widening out in all 
 directions ; and not till then did what Carlyle calls 
 " Pot-bellied Saxondom " pass away and the real 
 development of the English people begin. 
 
 All the tendency of the feudal system, working 
 through the machinery of the manorial courts, was 
 to keep the people doivn. All the tendency of the
 
 22 PARIS// L/FE IN ENGLAND 
 
 parochial system, working through the parish 
 council, holding its assemblies in the churches, 
 where the people met on equal terms as children 
 and servants of the living God and members of one 
 body in Christ Jesus, was to //// the people up. 
 
 In these assemblies there was no distinction 
 between lord and vassal, high and low, rich and 
 poor ; in them the people learnt the worth of being 
 free. Here were the schools in which, in the slow 
 course of centuries, they were diciplined to self-help, 
 self-reliance, and self-respect — virtues which, it may 
 be, are slowly learnt, but whereby alone a nation 
 acquires a true conception of what liberty means, 
 and at last gets to see that the ground of all our 
 claims to enjoy the rights of manhood or of citizen- 
 ship rests upon the grand fact of our being all 
 members of a Divine community, and so entitled to 
 the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free. 
 
 In proportion as the people realised that their 
 churches were, somehow or other — and of course 
 they realised it only very, very slowly and very 
 gradually — the very bulwarks of their liberty, and 
 that, however much they might be in bondage to 
 the lords of the manors, as parishioners, at any 
 rate, they were free men and free women, in that 
 proportion did they love their churches : there, at 
 any rate, their rights were inviolable.
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 53 
 
 But, granted that the people in the villages found 
 the money or the materials for the fabrics, who 
 carried out the work, made the plans, and executed 
 them ? Who were the actual builders ? 
 
 The answer to this question used to be given in a 
 tone of unhesitating certainty, such as is eminently 
 comforting to people who are easily satisfied. 
 That answer used to be : " Oh ! the builders of our 
 churches were the Freemasons. The Freemasons 
 went scampering about in great gangs, and they 
 settled themselves down in a district, and they ran 
 up a church in no time. . . ." And when any too 
 rudely inquisitive gentleman made so bold as to ask, 
 "Well, but who were the Freemasons ?" the crush- 
 ing reply was always ready, " Pray, sir, are you a 
 Freemason ? " And if with shame and confusion 
 of face you said, " No," then you were asked, "How, 
 sir, can you seriously expect that the secrets of the 
 sacred craft will be revealed to you I " Of course 
 you felt small, and you naturally dropped the 
 subject. 
 
 But though I am no Freemason, and am there- 
 fore a despicable creature, I may be silenced and 
 yet not convinced. And I am bold to affirm that I 
 no more believe that the Freemasons, whoever the 
 Freemasons may have been, built our churches 
 than that they built Noah's ark.
 
 24 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 The evidence is abundant and positive, and is 
 increasing upon us year by year, that the work done 
 upon the fabrics of our churches, and the other 
 work done in the beautifying of the interior of our 
 churches, such as the wood carving of our screens, 
 the painting of the lovely figures in the panels of 
 those screens, the embroidery of the banners and 
 vestments, the frescoes on the walls, the engraving 
 of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the 
 windows, and all that vast aggregate of artistic 
 achievements which existed in immense profusion 
 in our village churches till the frightful spoliation of 
 those churches in the sixteenth century stripped 
 them bare — all this was executed by local craftsmen. 
 The evidence for this is accumulating upon us every 
 year, as one antiquary after another succeeds in 
 unearthing fragments of pre-Reformation church- 
 wardens' accounts. 
 
 We have actual contracts for church building and 
 church repairing undertaken by village contractors. 
 We have the cost of a rood-screen paid to a village 
 carpenter, of painting executed by local artists. We 
 find the names of artificers, described as atiri/aber, 
 or worker in gold and silver, living in a parish which 
 could never have had five hundred inhabitants ; we 
 find the people in another place casting a new bell 
 and making the mould for it themselves ; we find
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 25 
 
 the blacksmith of another place forging the iron- 
 work for the church door, or we get a payment 
 entered for the carving of the bench-ends in a little 
 church five hundred years ago, which bench-ends 
 are to be seen in that church at the present moment. 
 And we get fairly bewildered by the astonishing 
 wealth of skill and artistic taste and assthetic feeling 
 which there must have been in this England of ours 
 in times which till lately we had assumed to be 
 barbaric times. Bewildered, I say, because we 
 cannot understand how it all came to a dead-stop in 
 a single generation, not knowing that the frightful 
 spoliation of our churches and other parish 
 buildings, and the outrageous plunder of the parish 
 gilds in the reign of Edward the Sixth, by the 
 horrible band of robbers that carried on their 
 detestable work, effected such a hideous obliteration, 
 such a clean sweep of the precious treasures that 
 were dispersed in rich profusion over the whole 
 land, that a dull despair of ever replacing what had 
 been ruthlessly pillaged crushed the spirit of the 
 whole nation, and art died out in rural England, 
 and King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled 
 supreme for centuries. 
 
 But the keeping up of the mere fabric of tiie 
 church was but the beginning of (he burdens so 
 cheerfully borne by the people of the medieval
 
 26 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 parish. Only ;i little less onerous was the duty of 
 keeping up the religious services in the church. 
 
 The people were never weary of taking part in the 
 elaborate ritual which had been growing in pomp 
 and magnificence for hundreds of years, when the 
 sixteenth century opened. How was it that high 
 and low did so dearly love going to church ? How 
 was it that the more saints' days and church festivals 
 there were enjoined, the better the people liked it ? 
 
 There were many reasons which may be men- 
 tioned ; but there is one reason which has been, I 
 think, overlooked, and which affords an illustration 
 of what was said before, viz., that our churches were 
 the great strongholds of the sentiment of liberty and 
 the great reminders to the people of their rights as 
 freemen. 
 
 The tenants of a manor, from the very beginning 
 of the manorial system, were bound to render 
 certain personal services to the lord of the manor, 
 and actually to perform tasks of manual labour at 
 the lord's bidding, to an extent which it is very 
 difficult for us nowadays to understand. 
 
 These services implied that for so many days in 
 the year the lord might claim from the tenant his 
 best toil without paying him fair wages for that toil. 
 The tenant, in fact, had to keep the lord's demesne 
 land (which we may call the home farm) in
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE i) 
 
 cultivation before he began upon his own httle strip 
 or allotment. 
 
 There was no getting off these services, which 
 were all set down in what are called the Manorial 
 Extents. And as long as the services were 
 rigorously exacted the case of the tenants of a 
 manor was very little better than downright slavery. 
 But here the Church stepped in, and put forth its 
 counterclaim upon the time of the lord's tenants. 
 Roger and Hans and Hodge might be bound to 
 give so many days' work for the tillage of the 
 demesne land. But on this day, or that day, or the 
 other day, there was a feast of the Church to be 
 kept, and on each of those days Hans and Hodge 
 were bound to pay suit and service and do homage to 
 the Lord our God. There was a conflict between 
 the Divine and the human Lord. 
 
 To begin with, the seventh day is a holy day. On 
 that day, at any rate, the serf or the villein, the 
 cottager or the ploughman, shall do no manner of 
 work 1 Or, again, Roger, the holder of such-and- 
 such a strip of land, was bound by what we should 
 now call his lease to do his prescribed task work on 
 every Thursday in the summer months. But on 
 Holy Thursday there is another great feast of the 
 Lord — the Feast of the Ascension. On that 
 Thursday he is due in the house of God. There-
 
 28 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 fore on that day he is a free man. Or it might be 
 that by the constitution of the manor a court ought 
 to be held on the second Tuesday in June, on which 
 day all the homage — i.e., all the tenants of the 
 manor — would be required to put in an appearance. 
 But suppose in the year 1340 the Feast of St. 
 Barnabas chanced to fall upon that second Tuesday. 
 "Then we, the parishioners, are due at the church, 
 to keep the feast there ; for was not our church 
 dedicated to St. Barnabas ? And is it to be heard 
 of that we should be absent when the Feast of the 
 Dedication is going to be celebrated ? Clearly the 
 manor court must be held some other day, for our 
 festivals are high days and holy days, and we must 
 not appear before the Lord empty." 
 
 It was inevitable that these holy days should tend 
 to increase in number, and equally inevitable that 
 the festivals, beginning by being holy days, would 
 rapidly become holidays, feasting days, days of 
 revelry, days of merriment ; days when the young 
 men shot for a prize at the butts ; ^ days when the 
 
 ' There is a long strip of land immediately adjoining the 
 north boundary of the churchyard of Becslon-next-Mileham 
 in Norfolk wliich was formerly the practising ground for the 
 young archers of the parish. It is still called the bulls, and is, 
 if I mistake not, still parish land. 
 
 The croft on which the Free School at Swaffham in the 
 same county is built, "is now called the sitooling land," says
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 2g 
 
 maidens held the bridge over the stream, and 
 allowed none of the young men to pass without 
 paying toll, the sum levied being duly paid into the 
 hands of the churchwardens and accounted for in 
 the annual balance-sheet ; days when I suspect, 
 too, that the village alehouses were closed, and yet 
 when the people met together for a church ale, as 
 the gathering was called — days, above all, when 
 there were miracle plays acted, or historic plays, 
 when Robin Hood was the prominent figure, or 
 the great fight between St. George and the dragon 
 was represented with a gruesome realism, and the 
 unhappy dragon was cruelly battered by the mighty 
 Samt who showed off his terrible prowess. Then 
 there were the Rogation days, when the people — 
 mind ! the parishioners — went in procession to walk 
 the bounds, not of the manor — that be far from us 
 — but of the parish, with the priest at their head and 
 the cross-bearer leading the way, and the minstrels 
 following after ; and there was much romping and 
 tumbling and practical joking, and often, I doubt 
 not, a good deal of very plain speaking against the 
 lord and the lord's steward, and the bailiff and the 
 bailiff's wife, and all the unpopular functionaries. 
 But besides all this there were small associations, 
 
 Blomcficld, writin;:; about the year 1740" ("History of Nor- 
 folk," vol vi. p. 2i6, n. 2).
 
 J 
 
 o PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 called gilds, the members of which were bound to 
 devote a certain portion of their time and their 
 money and their energies to keep up the special 
 commemoration and the special worship of some 
 saint's chapel or shrine, which was sometimes set 
 up in a corner of the church, and provided with an 
 altar of its own, and served by a chaplain who was 
 actually paid by the subscriptions or freewill offer- 
 ings of the members of the gild whose servant he 
 was. Frequently there were half a dozen of these 
 brotherhoods, who met on different days in the 
 year ; and frequently — indeed, one may say usually 
 — there was a church house, a kind of parish club, 
 in which the gilds held their meetings and trans- 
 acted their business. Sometimes this church house 
 was called the gild hall ; for you must not make the 
 mistake of thinking that the church houses were 
 places of residence for the clergy. Nothing of that 
 kind. The church house or gild hall grew up as an 
 institution which had become necessary when the 
 social life of the parish had outgrown the accom- 
 modation which the church could afford, and when, 
 indeed, there was just a trifle too much boisterous 
 merriment and too little religious seriousness and 
 sobriety to allow of the assemblies being held in the 
 church at all. The church house in many places 
 became one of the most important buildings in a
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 31 
 
 parish, and in the Httle town of Dereham, in Nor- 
 folk, the church house or gild hall is still, I think, 
 the largest house in the town, and is inhabited by 
 a gentleman who still points to the vestiges of its 
 former importance. When the great fire took place 
 at Dereham, in 1581, which destroyed almost the 
 whole town, the gild hall or church house, from 
 being well built of stone, was almost the only 
 building in the place which escaped the terrible 
 conflagration. These church houses, when the 
 parishes and the gilds were plundered of their 
 movables and money, appear to have been left 
 unnoticed by the robbers, and after being kept in 
 repair for a generation or two, and let at a low rent 
 to tenants who were not likely to spend anything 
 upon them, they were allowed to fall into ruins for 
 the most part, or were sold for the benefit of the 
 parishes, and the proceeds applied to such objects 
 as the churchwardens of a later time were inclined 
 to favour. This, however, is a branch of my subject 
 which requires much more attention than it has yet 
 received. 
 
 During the last twenty years much time and 
 research have been bestowed by students of our 
 social history upon a class of documents which 
 exist in immense numbers, and which are known as
 
 32 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 the Rolls of the Manor Courts. These documents 
 tell us a great deal about the sins and offences, 
 the quarrels and the misdemeanors, sometimes too 
 about the troubles and the wrongs and the suffer- 
 ings, of the people during the centuries loosely 
 designated as the " Middle Ages." But these docu- 
 ments tell almost nothing about the other side — the 
 bright side of village life. Indeed, it may be said 
 that the Court Rolls give us pretty much the same 
 notion of the habits of the people in those days as 
 we should get from the reports of the police-courts 
 regarding the habits of the people in our own days. 
 When, in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, 
 naughty people cribbed their neighbour's apples ; 
 when they trespassed upon their neighbour's land, 
 and appropriated here a faggot or there a bough of 
 a tree that the wind had blown down ; when they 
 would not pay their debts, or punched one another's 
 noses, or cheated or slandered one another ; when 
 they milked a neighbour's cow, or ploughed up a 
 furrow from somebody else's land, or shouldered a 
 sheaf of oats from the other side of the boundary, 
 and pitched it on to their own stack ; when a young 
 man and a young woman fell so violently in love 
 with each other that nothing would stop them from 
 going and getting married without waiting to get 
 leave and licence from the lord of the manor — then
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 33 
 
 each and all of these peccadillos came under the 
 notice of the court leet or the manor court, as the 
 case might be, and the offender's name and his 
 offence were duly entered upon the Rolls, and there 
 they are by the thousands and tens of thousands. 
 
 But though we are all miserable sinners, yet, be 
 it spoken in all seriousness and earnestness, our 
 lives are not passed in doing "what we hadn't ought 
 to," as we say in Norfolk ; life has its laughter as 
 well as its tears, and a nation grows up to great- 
 ness by its innocent amusements, by its gradual 
 rising in the scale of civilisation and intelligence, 
 by culture and refinement, by the potent influences 
 which a higher scale of comfort in the home and a 
 higher standard of beauty in art exercise upon the 
 generations as they pass. If you want to watch 
 this progress, or if you want to compare the 
 morals and manners of one age with those of 
 another, you must not confine yourself to the study 
 of the police-reports. There you will not find the 
 bright side of life, whether in the nineteenth century 
 or in the fourteenth. You must go elsewhere. 
 
 The main source of information on this side is to 
 be found in the accounts of the churchwardens, 
 which year by year have been made up for every 
 parish in England for many centuries, and which 
 at one time must have been only less voluminous 
 
 4
 
 34 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 than the Rolls of the Manor Courts. Unhappily, 
 one of the inevitable consequences of what I have 
 called the pillage of the parishes was the neglect of 
 this class of records, insomuch that examples of 
 churchwardens' accounts earlier than the sixteenth 
 century are rarely to be met with ; they are few 
 and far to seek. Nevertheless, there is reason for 
 believing that many more of them are still pre- 
 served in out-of-the-way nooks and corners than is 
 generally supposed, and that by careful search 
 many more may yet be recovered. The curious 
 facts which they reveal to us, the light they throw 
 upon the old life, the suggestions which they make 
 to us when we endeavour to utilise their evidence, 
 what they tell and what they hint, and what they 
 leave unsaid with the eloquence of silence — all this 
 must be dealt with in another chapter.
 
 II 
 
 WHEN it is remembered that at the beginning 
 of the sixteenth century every parish in 
 England was an organised community, which 
 had for centuries enjoyed the management of its 
 own affairs according to a financial system that 
 was in the main identical through the length 
 and breadth of the land, it becomes obvious that 
 at the time referred to there must have existed 
 thousands, and tens of thousands, of records 
 containing important evidences of the social and 
 religious life of the parishes during ages past. 
 
 These records consisted chiefly of those balance 
 sheets laid before the parishioners in open meeting 
 at the annual audit, and known as the church- 
 wardens' accounts. It will be sufficient for the 
 present to confine our attention to these accounts, 
 though it may be as well to warn my readers that 
 there are other documents besides these which 
 inquirers who set themselves to make a thorough 
 
 35
 
 36 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 study of parochial antiquities will have to reckon 
 with. 
 
 Down to within quite recent times so utterly 
 was the corporate life of our parishes neglected, 
 overlooked, and forgotten that it is only during 
 the last thirty years or so that the very existence 
 of the churchwardens' accounts has been noticed 
 even by county historians. It may safely be said 
 that up to the present moment hardly fifty of these 
 collections of parish balance sheets have been 
 printed ; though, after all the wanton destruction 
 and ignorant neglect that has for so long 
 characterised our treatment of local records, it 
 will probably be proved that in hundreds of 
 parishes some fragments, more or less complete, 
 may be still hidden away in old corners and 
 mouldering in our village and town chests. These 
 are the drift and salvage of unnumbered books and 
 memoranda utilised for generations to light the 
 vestry fire on Sundays, or even for less honourable 
 purposes. Yet when we come to look into these 
 old-world story books — at first sight so dull and 
 monotonous — what a new light begins to shine 
 upon a condition of affairs which has now passed 
 away, upon the old order which has changed for 
 ever, upon a phase of our national life which 
 helped so powerfully in the evolution of the new
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE n 
 
 order under which we live, and which itself in 
 its turn must pass and change into we know not 
 what. I 
 
 The first question that people ask when they 
 are told that our churches were built, kept in repair, 
 and furnished with a profusion of ornaments in the 
 old days is. Where did they get the money from ? 
 To answer this question it is necessary to deal with 
 the financial system in our parishes anterior to the 
 great pillage. 
 
 Let me, however, at this point explain what I do 
 not mean when I talk about the pillage. I have little 
 or nothing to say in these papers about the suppres- 
 sion of the monasteries ; I do not touch upon that ; 
 I am very little concerned with that. When I talk 
 
 ' The most important collection of churchwardens' accounts 
 which has yet been published is that issued by the Somerset 
 Record Society in 1890, under the very able editorship of that 
 veteran scholar and antiquary Bishop Hobhousc. The volume 
 contains transcripts and full analyses of the accounts of six 
 parishes in Somerset ranging over a period of two hundred 
 years, the earliest beginning as far back as a.d. 1349, the latest 
 concerned with 1560. The Bishop's preface furnishes an 
 admirable introduction to the whole subject, and it is liardly 
 loo much to say that its appearance marks an era in a new 
 branch of historical investigation.
 
 38 PAKISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 about the great pillage, I mean that horrible and 
 outrageous looting of our churches other than con- 
 ventual, and the robbing of the people of this 
 country of property in land and movables, which 
 property had actually been inherited by them 
 as members of those organised religious com- 
 munities known as parishes. It is necessary to 
 emphasise the fact that in the general scramble 
 of the Terror under Henry the Eighth, and of the 
 anarchy in the days of Edward the Sixth, there was 
 only one class that was permitted to retain any large 
 portion of its endowments. The monasteries were 
 plundered even to their very pots and pans. Alms- 
 houses in which old men and women were fed and 
 clothed were robbed to the last pound, the poor 
 almsfolk being turned out in the cold at an hour's 
 warning to beg their bread. Hospitals for the sick 
 and needy, sometimes magnificently provided with 
 nurses and chaplains, whose very raison d'etre was 
 that they were to look after and care for those 
 who were past caring for themselves, these were 
 stripped of all their belongings, the inmates sent out 
 to hobble into some convenient dry ditch to lie 
 down and die in, or to crawl into some barn or 
 hovel, there to be tended, not without fear of 
 consequences, by some kindly man or woman 
 who could not bear to sec a suffering fellow-
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 39 
 
 creature drop down and die at their own door- 
 posts.i 
 
 We talk with a great deal of indignation of the 
 Taiiunany ring. The day will come when some one 
 will write the story of two other rings : the ring of 
 the miscreants who robbed the monasteries in the 
 reign of Henry the Eighth was the first ; but the 
 ring of the robbers who robbed the poor and help- 
 less in the reign of Edward the Sixth was ten times 
 worse than the first. 
 
 The Universities only just escaped the general 
 confiscation ; the friendly societies and benefit clubs 
 and the gilds did not escape. The accumulated 
 wealth of centuries, their houses and lands, their 
 money, their vessels of silver and their vessels of 
 gold, their ancient cups and goblets and salvers, 
 even to their very chairs and tables, were all set 
 down in inventories and catalogues, and all swept 
 
 ' Men and brcthcn, you doubtless think this mere exaggera- 
 tion. If you do, and if you have the will to learn the plain, 
 unvarnished truth and the means to pay an expert duly 
 equipped for the task, give that expert a commission to write 
 a history of tlic Grand Hospital of St. Mary's, Newark (one 
 among many such hospitals), an account of what it was, 
 and what it was doing say in 1540, and of its utter desolation 
 and ruin less than ten years after, wlien the lust of gain in tlic 
 spirit of Cain was master of the situation, and men in liigli 
 places, of high birth, and even of high culture, found the spirit 
 of the age too strong for them.
 
 40 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 into the great robbers' hoard. Last, not least, the 
 immense treasures in the churches, the joy and 
 boast of every man and woman and child in 
 England, who day by day and week by week 
 assembled to worship in the old houses of God, 
 which they and their fathers had built, and whose 
 every vestment and chalice, and candlestick and 
 banner, organs and bells, and picture and image, 
 and altar and shrine they looked upon as their own, 
 and part of their birthright — all these were torn 
 away by the rudest spoilers, carted off, they knew 
 not whither, with jeers and scoffs and ribald shout- 
 ings, while none dared raise a hand or let his voice 
 be heard above the whisper of a prayer of bitter 
 grief and agony. 
 
 One class was spared. The clergy of this Church 
 of England of ours, managed to retain some of their 
 endowments ; but if the boy king had lived another 
 three years there is good reason for believing that 
 these too would have gone. 
 
 All this monstrous and incalculable havoc, lasting 
 hardly more than six years, is what I mean when I 
 talk about The Great Pillage. 
 
 The income of the Parish community was ad- 
 ministered, as we have seen, by the churchwardens,
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 41 
 
 who had annually to give an account of the receipts 
 and expenditure. The wardens were not usually 
 the collectors of the revenues, two or more receivers 
 {receptores) being appointed for getting in the various 
 contributions or dues from the parishioners. The 
 sources of this annual income were very various. 
 
 (i) To begin with, most parishes — perhaps all 
 parishes — had some real property in land, and 
 occasionally in houses too. The land usually con- 
 sisted of a number of small and scattered parcels, 
 which had been left to the community from time 
 to time, or made over to them by well-disposed 
 parishioners, and were sometimes held under con- 
 ditions of providing for some special services in the 
 Church. Besides this it was not at all uncommon 
 for a parish to be possessed of a small flock of 
 sheep ; and many parishes owned a herd of cows, 
 usually let out to farm, and doubtless to the highest 
 bidder.! Thus, as late as 1552, the wardens of 
 Stanford-in-the-Vale, Berks, set down "the hire of 
 eight sheep that belongeth to the Church." At 
 Elmscote, in Essex, in 1543, there was a herd of 
 fifteen cows let out to provide for the lights at the 
 various altars. Twenty years later the fifteen had 
 been reduced to nine, the rent now being distributed 
 among the poor. We country folk know what that 
 
 .' See Ashley's " Economic History," vol. i. part ii. p. 311.
 
 41 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 means, and we note, too, tliat in the old days there 
 was no such thing as a Poor Rate, the poor in the 
 old days having no need for any special tax or rate 
 or tribute to insure their being kept from starvation. 
 
 (2) The legacies bequeathed by the people in their 
 wills ; money, jewelry, silver goblets, and other 
 valuables, rings, and "pairs of beads," or rosaries. I 
 have alreadv mentioned that these ornaments were 
 sometimes, but not always, turned into money. 
 Sometimes they were utilised to adorn the images, 
 especially of the Blessed Virgin, or some favourite 
 saint ; sometimes they were kept as stock — i.c.y as a 
 "reserved fund," to be drawn upon in some financial 
 crisis. 
 
 (3) In many parishes the "upper classes," or those 
 who were well-to-do, were expected to submit to a 
 kind of assessment or voluntary rate, according to 
 methods which we cannot now explain. Thus, in 
 the wardens' accounts of Swaffham in Norfolk, and 
 in those of Walberswick and Blyburgh in Suffolk, 
 we meet with lists of profercrs who are somewhat 
 large contributors to the Church funds. In the two 
 Suffolk parishes the profcrcrs were evidently owners 
 of fishing boats, and their prefers appear to have 
 been regulated according to the amount of fish taken 
 during the season. 
 
 (4) The collections in the churches — generally
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 43 
 
 designated as gatherings — seem to have been made 
 as occasion required. There seems to have been no 
 rule in making these gatherings, and it is probable 
 that they were resorted to when the funds in the 
 hands of the wardens were low. I have found as 
 many as ten gatherings in a single year. 
 
 (5) Another source of revenue was the fees ex- 
 acted by the parish for the burial of " people of 
 importance" who desired to be laid in the church 
 itself. The significance of this must not be passed 
 over. It should be remembered that the surface of 
 the soil of the churchyard was part of the parson's 
 freehold. Any parishioner had a right of sepulture 
 in God's acre; but the parson could always claim 
 his fee for "breaking the soil," and this was a source 
 of income to him. So with the chancel — that too 
 was the parson's freehold — and for burial there, in 
 the most holy part of the church, very considerable 
 fees were from time to time claimed and paid. But 
 the church itself — i.e., the nave — was the property of 
 the parish, and when a local magnate specially 
 desired to be buried there, he, or his executors, had 
 to make his bargain with the churchwardens, and 
 with them alone. This will explain the following 
 entries in the "Walberswick Accounts" (1498): 
 " Received for the soul of Sir Harry Barbour, 
 6s. 8d." ; and again, in 1466: "Mem. Nicholas
 
 44 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 Browne granted to the church 20s. for bringing of 
 his wife in the church. And a gravestone to be 
 laid upon the grave." 
 
 (6) Among the most profitable sources of revenue 
 known to the wardens were the great festive enter- 
 tainments called the church ales. They have almost 
 their exact counterparts in our modern public 
 dinners for charitable (?) purposes, such as the 
 annual dinner for the Literary Fund or for the 
 Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy ; and the 
 public teas so common among the Nonconformist 
 bodies. They were held in the church houses, 
 which were well furnished with all the necessary 
 appliances for cooking, brewing, and for giving 
 accommodation for a large company. Often a 
 generous parishioner would provide a bullock or a 
 sheep or two for the entertainment, and another 
 good-natured man would offer a quarter of malt to 
 be brewed for the occasion. The skins of the 
 slaughtered sheep are often entered on the credit 
 side of the accounts, and occasionally smaller 
 contributions of spices and other condiments 
 were offered. Of course the inevitable collection 
 followed ; and, according to the goodness of the 
 feast, the number of the guests, or their satisfaction 
 with the arrangements made, the amount of dona- 
 tions was large or small.
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 45 
 
 (7) Supplementary to all these ordinary sources 
 of income there came in the continual subsidiary 
 loans without interest, and liberal levies which the 
 gilds were continually affording to the parish funds. 
 I do not yet feel that I am qualified to speak with 
 any confidence or anything approaching authority 
 on the subject of the gilds. Indeed, I must confess 
 that many difficulties which beset the financial 
 arrangements of these bodies remain hitherto, for 
 me, unexplained. They were benefit clubs, they 
 were savings banks, they were social unions, and, 
 like every other association in the Middle Ages, they 
 were religious bodies, so religious that they were 
 continually building special chapels for themselves, 
 and they had chaplains of their own who received a 
 regular stipend. Frequently they were splendidly 
 provided with magnificent copes and banners and 
 hangings, and large stores of costly chalices and 
 jewelled service books used on festive occasions in 
 the worship of the gild chapel. I have never met 
 with the least indication that the gilds were at any 
 moment other than solvent. So far from this, the 
 gilds appear to have always had money in hand ; 
 and I suspect that in many cases they must have 
 done some banking business on a small scale by 
 taking care of thrifty people's savings, and by 
 lending money in small sums on security. Tiiis, at 
 
 (I'
 
 46 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 I suspect, they did a little in the way of pawnbrok- 
 ing, guarding, however, against the risk of lending 
 "upon usury" by charging not for the loan of mouey, 
 but perhaps charging fees for the custody of the 
 deposits on which advances were made. Be that as 
 it may, however, it is abundantly clear that the gilds 
 were very powerful supporters of the needs of the 
 parish. One meets with them continually making 
 large loans to the churchwardens when any extra- 
 ordinary expenses were being incurred. In fact, 
 when the parish was in a difficulty for money to 
 carry on any improvements or repairs, the gilds 
 were always to be relied on to afford the necessary 
 aid. 
 
 Over and above these regular sources of income 
 the wardens had other ways and means to trust to. 
 Certainly in the fifteenth century, and how much 
 earlier I cannot say, seats in the churches were 
 appropriated to " the better sort," and an annual rent 
 charged for them. These seats were assigned ap- 
 parently to women almost exclusively. The practice, 
 however, seems to have been by no means common, 
 and in the country churches was probably rare. 
 
 So entirely was the life of the parish saturated 
 with religious sentiment and with religious observ- 
 ances that even the most frivolous or the most 
 boisterous amusements of the people were, directly
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE &ri 
 
 or indirectly, under the supervision of the church- 
 wardens. And this brings us to the dramatic 
 entertainments so popular among all classes in the 
 Middle Ages. As in Pagan Greece and Pagan 
 Rome, the origin of dramatic performances and 
 dramatic literature must be sought in the rude 
 religious mummeries which formed part of the 
 worship of some heathen god ; so our own theatri- 
 cal representations, with all their modern splendour 
 and artistic display, are but the survivals — or must 
 we say they exhibit the evolution ? — of the pageants, 
 mysteries, or religious plays of the Middle Ages. 
 There is reason for believing that the performance 
 of these curious dramas to large assemblies of 
 ignorant Christian people dates back from very early 
 times. This is, however, not the place to plunge 
 into so obscure a subject as the history of the drama, 
 whether in England or elsewhere. There is no 
 need to try to get behind the twelfth century, when, 
 as Thomas of Walsingham tells us, a very learned 
 and otherwise estimable clergyman named Geoffrey 
 of Gorham, who afterwards became sixteenth abbot, 
 of St. Albans, distinguished himself by writing a 
 certain play — quern "Miraciila" viilgaritcr appellaums 
 — on Saint Catherine. Geoffrey was at the time 
 head master of the school at Dunstable, and, wishing 
 to make the first representation of his play con-
 
 48 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 spicuously magnificent, he sent to St. Albans to 
 borrow certain very precious copes, and possibly 
 other vestments, from his friend the abbot there. 
 By ill luck a fearful fire broke out in poor Geoffrey's 
 house, and all the copes, together with his own 
 books, were burnt, which so affected the poor man 
 that nothing would satisfy his anguished mind but 
 that then and there he must offer himself as a monk 
 to the great abbey and give himself to the strict 
 service of God — seipsum reddidit in holocaiisfuin Deo. 
 In process of time he became abbot, and so was 
 able to make good the loss which had been sus- 
 tained.^ From this time notices of these sacred 
 dramas become frequent ; and if any one wants to 
 know more about them there are "lots of jolly 
 books " which he may refer to in the Chester Plays, 
 and the Coventry Plays, and the Townely Mysteries, 
 and a great deal more on which I cannot dwell 
 here.2 Let me, however, suggest to any one in- 
 terested in such matters that if he can pick up a 
 copy of "A Collection of English Miracle Plays," 
 published with a valuable introduction at Basle in 
 
 ' "Gcsta Abbatum Monast. Si. Albani." Rolls scries, vol. i. 
 p. 72. 
 
 ' See the important extracts, &c., from the " Lincoln Liber. 
 Albus," on the gilds and miracle plays ; and on the inven- 
 tories in "The Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries," 
 vol. xvii, (second series).
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 49 
 
 1838, by William Marriott, Ph.D. he should use his 
 opportunity and buy that book, for it is a scarce 
 one. 
 
 It is commonly believed that these plays were 
 acted in the churches. I have a strong suspicion 
 that instances of the church being used for such 
 representations except in very early times were rare. 
 Ecclesiastical feeling was soon opposed to such 
 desecration, and there were many orders issued 
 against the practice, and some against even using 
 the churchyard for such performances. I have met, 
 indeed, with one instance where the church porch 
 was fitted up with seats or benches for the spectators 
 to sit on, the stage being evidently set up outside in 
 the churchyard. But it is difficult to believe that as 
 the churches became more and more crowded with 
 monuments, ornaments, altars, and religious fur- 
 niture of all kinds, the naves could have lent them- 
 selves for scenic performance, and moreover the 
 sentiment of reverence for the church as a place of 
 worship was always growing, and the clergy and 
 religious orders set their faces against this dese- 
 cration of the house of God. Nor is this all. The 
 concourse of people attending these plays was 
 sometimes very large, the players many, and the 
 scenery and stage demanded a considerable space. 
 In the accounts of the churchwardens of Basing- 
 
 5
 
 so PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 bourne, in Cambridgeshire, there is a notice of the 
 performance of the miracle play of St. George. It 
 was evidently a monster performance, for no fewer 
 than twenty-seven neighbouring parishes contributed 
 towards the expenses. Obviously such an audience 
 could not have been accommodated in any village 
 church, and accordingly a charge for the hire of a 
 field in which the performance took place is duly 
 entered. Similar entries for rent of a meadow or 
 piece of ground occur now and then elsewhere. 
 The attractions of these miracle plays went on 
 steadily increasing as the scenery and dresses 
 became more elaborate, and they continued to be 
 acted in the towns long after they had quite ceased 
 to be represented in the country ; for this very good 
 reason — if for no other — that in the towns here and 
 there the gilds managed to keep some portion of 
 their possessions, and among them their "stage 
 properties " and the buildings in which the plays 
 were acted. 
 
 The actors in these parish dramas appear to have 
 received no wages for their acting except the meat 
 and drink which was the inevitable concomitant of 
 all public gatherings ; the honour of representing 
 St. George or St. Catherine, Balaam or John the 
 Baptist, an angel or a demon, was its own reward. 
 As, they tell me, ivas the case at Ober Ammergau
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 51 
 
 till lately, so it was among us, a man who had taken 
 the part of Judas, or Moses, or Pharaoh seems to 
 have often retained the name of the character in 
 which he had appeared on the stage for some time 
 after the performance. Hence we get such grotesque 
 charges as the following : " For Adam to make a 
 pair of hosen," " for a coat to Robin Hood," " for 
 5 ells of canvas for a coat for Maid Marian," " for 
 a coat for God" (!) "for a pair of shoes for the 
 devil" (!) 
 
 This part of my subject is so full of interest, and 
 there is so much that might be said upon it, that I 
 have been tempted to dwell upon it at greater length 
 than I had intended. The point to be kept in view, 
 however, is that these plays were a considerable 
 source of revenue to the parishes in which they 
 were acted. The profits accrued to the parish 
 funds, and when one parish was fortunate enough 
 to have a large stock of dresses or other stage 
 apparatus, it was not uncommon for these to be 
 let out on hire to another parish which was less well 
 provided with such necessaries. 
 
 So far we have been dealing with the regular 
 income of the parishes. But, over and above these, 
 there was, as I have already noticed, an enormous 
 aggregate of dead capital which was always going
 
 Si PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 on growing, and which, while it was a source of 
 pride and dcHglit to the members of the parish 
 communities — exactly as family jewels or other 
 heirlooms are to those who claim, during life, the 
 exclusive use of them — so it was now and then a 
 source of expense too to the parishes, which were 
 bound to keep these heirlooms in serviceable repair, 
 and from time to time to renew them. Edward the 
 Third (a.d. 1327-1377) is said to have taken great 
 interest in clocks, and to have given a great stimulus 
 to their general introduction in England. At the 
 beginning of the fifteenth century there seems to 
 have been quite a mania for setting up parish clocks. 
 They were, doubtless, clumsy affairs, and they were 
 certainly very expensive luxuries. It is rare to find 
 any parish accounts of the fifteenth century without 
 finding a clock mentioned. It was always wanting 
 mending, and it required a functionary to look after 
 it, who usually took a contract for a year, but it was 
 the joy and pride of the parish. After the middle of 
 the sixteenth century one rarely or ever meets with 
 any allusion to the clock in the country parishes. 
 Why ? Not only because the parish funds had been 
 stolen and the parish income had disappeared, but 
 because in the Pillage the parish bells had been 
 among the first things to pull down and sell. That 
 is, in Queen Elizabeth's days, there were no bells for 
 the clocks to strike on I
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 53 
 
 The bells, too, were a constant expense to the 
 parish in the old days. They were always being 
 rung, and always wanting new bell-ropes, new 
 clappers, and new hanging. Not only so, but in the 
 incessant use to which they were put day and night 
 the bells were always getting cracked. Then there 
 was a new bell to be provided, or it might be a new 
 peal ; but so self-supporting were the parishes, even 
 in "the very country," that there was never any 
 difficulty in casting a new bell. There were no 
 great bell-founders in great centres of industry, as 
 is the case now. The constant demand for this or 
 that skilled artificer went far to create the supply ; 
 the bell was wanted, and somehow — somehow — it 
 was made on the spot, or by some cunning man a 
 few miles off. To carry a big bell, say twenty or 
 thirty miles, over such roads as existed in the 
 fifteenth century, would be a very serious expense 
 indeed. To the craftsmen of those days it was a 
 much easier matter to make the bell where it was 
 going to be hung than to drag it along up hill and 
 down dale at the serious risk of breaking it in 
 transit. 
 
 So with the church books. They were in constant 
 use, and though they were written on vellum or 
 parchment the wear and tear was always heavy. 
 When the archdeacon, or his official, made his
 
 54 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 visitation to a church — and in the time we are 
 deaUng with the visitations were very serious 
 inejuests, and sometimes much dreaded — the first 
 thing he looked into was the condition of the service 
 books. They were brought before him for inspec- 
 tion, and every flaw or defect was noted. " Mr. 
 Churchwarden, I cannot let this missal pass or that 
 lectionary. You will provide new copies before I 
 come next, or the parish will, &c., &c." We actually 
 hear of churchwardens, in dread of what was hanging 
 over them, borrowing books and vestments from a 
 neighbouring parish and presenting them as their 
 own. The trick must have been practised pretty 
 often, for special pains and penalties were pro- 
 nounced upon such as should be guilty of such a 
 fraud. But when a service book was ordered to be 
 bound, or repaired, or condemned, the writing of a 
 new one or the mending of the old ones had to be 
 submitted to with the best grace possible, and no 
 time was to be lost. Very frequently we find a 
 charge on the accounts for the writing of a new 
 book ; and frequently the parish priest or one of the 
 chaplains has the job — he glad enough to get it — 
 and he is paid by the parish — observe again by tJie 
 parish — for his work. 
 
 Entries of money paid for " repairing of the 
 church books" and for "mending of vestments"
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 55 
 
 are constantly occurring. There seems to have been 
 a class of itinerant workmen who went from place 
 to place patching up the shabby vestments and re- 
 binding the books. Thus, in the accounts of the 
 parish of Denton, in Norfolk, we have (a.d. 1520) 
 charges " for mending of vestments . . . for linen 
 cloth and buckram and satin of Cyprus and ribbon 
 bought for the said vestments . . . and for 
 boarding of the said vestment-maker." Again, in 
 the wardens' accounts (a.d. 1525) of Bungay, in 
 Suffolk, we find "... paid to the bookbinder for 
 2 days and a half ... for his board . . . and for 
 parchment for to mend the said book." Two years 
 later there occurs "... paid to the embroiderer 
 [browder] for his work and for his boarding." Two 
 years later again the charges for binding the service 
 books and repairing vestments are so unusually 
 heavy that one can hardly help guessing that the 
 Archdeacon had come down very severely upon the 
 parishioners of St. Mary in Bungay. One Gerrard 
 was paid for " 3 calf skins for the reparacion of the 
 books " ; another worthy named Gyrling had fur- 
 nished "3 skins [query sheepskins] to the reparacion 
 of the books" . . . and" 4 red skins for the books" ; 
 while the bookbinder, whose name is not given, and 
 the writer had received liberal wages besides being 
 boarded for live weeks and an extra allowance for
 
 56 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 " certain skins, glue, vellum, and for mending certain 
 books" which had not been included in the original 
 contract. In the same account William Bode is 
 paid " for mending certain copes and vestments and 
 mending the best Banner," the wardens providing 
 "sewing silk for the vestments." Eighty years 
 earlier one of the parish chaplains of Southwold, 
 in Suffolk, Sir Edmund by name, receives a sum 
 equal to £j or ;^8 in our time "for making a 
 Manual " — one of the smaller service books — which 
 1 think must have been somewhat liberally illumi- 
 nated by the worthy scribe. The organs — they are 
 always named in the plural — were another source of 
 expense to the parishes. They too were always 
 requiring mending or tuning or otherwise looking 
 to, and though they did not cost as much as the 
 articles above named, yet they were an ecclesiastical 
 luxury which, like all other luxuries in daily use, 
 entailed a frequent outlay upon their proud pos- 
 sessors. 
 
 The real wealth of the cluirchcs, however, con- 
 sisted in the vast accumulations of gold and silver 
 vessels of various kinds, and the gorgeous vestments 
 only used on special occasions, which were kept in 
 the Sacristies or Treasuries of the parish churches. 
 No one who has not had his attention drawn to the 
 old inventories of such splendid churches as the
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 57 
 
 cathedrals of Exeter or St. Paul's can have anything 
 Hke an adequate idea of the prodigious accumula- 
 tions of wealth which some of our more important 
 churches in England boasted of in the fifteenth 
 century. I am not dealing with these instances, 
 however ; I confine myself to such parish churches 
 as were to be found all over the land ; and if I had 
 not so strong a desire, as I have, to rescue the word 
 parish from the grip of ignorant blunderers who 
 have gone so far as to make us forget what that 
 word connotes, I should have spoken of village 
 churches rather than parish churches. My wish is, 
 however, to draw attention to the country parishes 
 and their churches rather than to the town parishes, 
 though, of course, on this subject what is true of 
 the country parishes was much more true of town 
 parishes. The more thriving the people were the 
 more they spent upon their churches, and the strong 
 feeling of proprietorship in those churches led to 
 great rivalry among contiguous parishes in the 
 towns as well as in the rural districts. Happily, the 
 inventories of the contents of churches which were 
 from time to time handed in to the bishops or arch- 
 deacons on their periodical visitation have been 
 preserved in larger numbers than the church- 
 wardens' accounts. 
 
 Many of them have been printed, and many more
 
 58 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 are readily accessible to those who can read them. 
 The inventories of St. Lawrence, Reading, from 
 which Mr. Kerry has given some copious extracts, 
 show that the church plate of that parish — let alone 
 the vestments — was extremely magnificent, and he 
 estimates that its total weight must have exceeded 
 700 ounces when the inventory was made in 1523. 
 Much of this was of parcel gilt, and some of the 
 chalices, basins, crosses, and candlesticks were of 
 exquisite and priceless workmanship. Even more 
 remarkable than the Reading treasures, however, 
 were those which were set down in the inventory of 
 Long Melford church in 1529, from which it 
 appears that the gold and silver vessels almost 
 weighed 900 ounces, exclusive of jewels, rings, 
 enamelled girdles, buckles, and the like, some of 
 them studded with precious stones. The value of 
 the vestments of cloth of gold, and other costly 
 materials, miracles of daintiest needlework, is incal- 
 culable. Long Melford was at this time a flourishing 
 little Suffolk town, in which the clothiers were 
 carrying on a large trade, and money was being 
 made by employers and employed. 
 
 The " Black Book" of Swaffham, in Norfolk, con- 
 tains an earlier inventory of the church goods of this 
 parish ; unfortunately it is a mere fragment. Even 
 so, the list of vestments and ornaments fills seven
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 59 
 
 small folio pages, though some of the pages which 
 contained the lists of the church plate are missing. 
 It may be asked if all these vast accumulations of 
 treasure did not tempt the cupidity of robbers to 
 break in upon the sacristies of the churches, or the 
 "strong rooms" — the term occurs in the old 
 writings — of the gilds ? Of course they did. In 
 large and important churches, where it was well 
 known that there were great hoards stored up, it 
 was no uncommon practice for a watchman to sleep 
 in a chamber constructed for him in the church, 
 and in the articles of inquiry at the bishop's visita- 
 tions we find it asked : Whether such a watchman 
 regularly slept in the church, as his duty was ? 
 Ecclesiastical censures were frightfully severe upon 
 those guilty of the crime of sacrilege ; but they were 
 not terrible enough to prevent church robbers from 
 breaking open the sacristies when so much was to 
 be gained by a burglary. Thus in the Swaffham list 
 of plate — so provokingly defective — we are told that 
 on the night of Easter Sunday, 1475, three chalices 
 had been stolen and carried off. The thieves seem 
 to have been disturbed in their work, for a great 
 chalice of silver gilt, magni ponderis, a pix, and two 
 silver basins for the high altar had been left behind, 
 and how much more we shall never know. At 
 Long Melford, on the 13th of January, 1531, there
 
 6o PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 appears to have been a great robbery of plate from 
 the treasury, which we learn was in a room over the 
 vestry, and the thieves got off with a large amount 
 of plunder. There is no need to multiply instances, 
 for we are continually finding mention of such 
 robberies of church property, and I am sorry to say 
 the parsons did not always show an example of 
 strict honesty in these matters, as when one of them 
 appropriated a valuable cushion to his own use, and 
 another — I forget where — had filched an old but 
 handsomely broidered cloth from the church which 
 he served and used it as a coverlet for his own bed. 
 The poor man may have been cold, but he need not 
 have denied the theft when he was charged with it, 
 as it seems he did, for one witness came forward and 
 testified that he had himself seen the broidered cloth 
 upon the reverend gentleman's bed with his own 
 eyes 1 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 I fear I have taxed my readers' patience more 
 than enough ; for most people hate details, and on 
 details they will not dwell for long. Having got 
 thus far in an inquiry which has been really of a 
 very superficial character, it must suffice to state my 
 conviction, which becomes stronger and stronger 
 the further that inquiry is carried, that the property 
 of one kind or another owned by the parish com-
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 6r 
 
 munities throughout England in the first half of the 
 fifteenth century must have amounted to an aggre- 
 gate which represented millions of money. It 
 remains to inquire what became of it, and how it 
 vanished as it did. 
 
 The ninth and last Parliament of King Henry the 
 Eighth assembled at Westminster on the 23rd of 
 November, 1545. The great Act of the session was 
 "An Act for the dissolution of chantries, hospitals, 
 and free chapels," in which were included those 
 remarkable foundations known as secular colleges or 
 collegiate churches about which so little has hitherto 
 been written and about which much remains to be 
 written by some one qualified to treat of them.^ It 
 was enacted that all these foundations with all that 
 belonged to them should be forthwith surrendered 
 to the King during the term of his natural life, without 
 inquest before a jury or any other circumstance, 
 and, before the end of the year, colleges, hospitals, 
 chantries, and free chapels were falling rapidly to 
 the King. Mr. Dixon, in his very able " History of 
 the Church of England from the Abolition of the 
 
 ' I have touched lightly on the subject of these colleges, and 
 especially upon a group of them in Norfolk and Suffolk, which 
 were founded and endowed during the fourteenth century, in 
 my lamented friend Mr. Crabbe's " History of the Parish of 
 Thompson, co. Norfolk," 4to (A. H. Goose, Norwich, 1892), 
 p. 25, Introd. note.
 
 62 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 Roman Jurisdiction/' has given a brief — too brief — 
 account of these institutions.^ They had long been 
 threatened, and it had long been felt that now that 
 the vast possessions of the monasteries great and 
 small had been squandered and nothing remained 
 of them, the colleges and chantries must be con- 
 fiscated next. The plundering went on apace. 
 " For all that, the King's purse remained as empty 
 as ever, and his mysterious beggary was unappeased 
 still." But though the Court of Augmentation did 
 its work with unparalleled expedition — or, as one 
 may say, with the most shameless haste — the 
 hundreds of hospitals and colleges that were waiting 
 for the spoilers could not be abolished without some 
 legal formalities, and when Henry the Eighth died, 
 in January, 1547, there were hundreds of them still 
 standing, and the King's life interest (!) in them had 
 come to an end. That little diflficulty was soon got 
 over, and what had been granted to King Henry 
 was soon granted to his son, now upon the throne. 
 It makes one sick to read the hateful story ! Pro- 
 clamations, injunctions, orders of the council, and 
 what not came out in swarms, all having the same 
 object, the plundering of all corporate property — 
 chantries and chapels of ease, hospitals, colleges, 
 gilds — " all were handed over to the Crown." To 
 
 ' Vol. ii. p. 379.
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 63 
 
 the Crown, forsooth ! the crown that weighed so 
 heavily upon the brows of the sad boy king, now 
 scarce twelve years old. 
 
 I am not qualified to tell the story of those three 
 or four years which were chiefly taken up with the 
 plunder of the poor by the rich. It is an unwritten 
 chapter of English history, and has long been 
 waiting to be told. But let one caution be offered 
 to those who may set themselves to this great task. 
 Let them beware how they fall into the old mistake 
 which has led us all astray for so long. Let them 
 get rid of the old assumption that this monstrous 
 robbery was a necessary part of what we call the 
 Reformation. Religion had just about as much to 
 do with this business as religion had to do with the 
 September massacres at Paris in 1792. In the latter 
 case, the mob went raving mad with the lust of 
 blood ; in the former case, the richer classes went 
 raving mad with the lust of gain. 
 
 The most startling fact in the long series of 
 surprises which meets us, as the events of the first 
 two years of King Edward's reign pass before our 
 view, is that during all this time the old ritual was 
 still kept up in all our churches. The Mass was 
 still said or sung, prayers for the dead were still 
 offered up, and in an unknown tongue ; and Henry 
 the Eighth in his last will left vast sums to be spent
 
 64 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 in masses for his own soul. The church formularies 
 and church ritual had all this time been subjected 
 to very insignificant changes indeed. It was not till 
 May, 1549, that the first Prayer Book of Edward the 
 Sixth was issued. After its publication no other form 
 of prayer was allowed. The old service books were 
 at once doomed. Then, for the first time, the 
 people found themselves actually forbidden to use 
 those sacred vessels, ornaments, vestments, and the 
 like which they and their forefathers had delighted 
 in for centuries, which had been for them integral 
 parts of their religious observances, and had been 
 in their ignorance not only signs and symbols of the 
 faith they professed and had been taught, but their 
 helps and supports in every act of adoration, of 
 prayer and praise. 
 
 " But was it not all a mere mass of superstitious 
 and gross credulity, and were not these benighted 
 creatures grovelling in the mire and groping — if they 
 were groping — in a darkness that might be felt ? " 
 
 Well, suppose I say Yes ! and say it with a sigh. 
 Does that prevent me from calling to mind a pro- 
 found saying that Coleridge taught me, say, fifty 
 years ago ? " My friends, a clothing even of 
 withered leaves is better than bareness."
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 65 
 
 " Why, this man is a renegade. He wants ail the 
 abominations of the scarlet woman brought back 
 again ! " 
 
 Does he ? How little you know him ! 
 
 " He's a Crypto Papist ! a mummer — a man who 
 scrapes and bows up and down the aisles, and kisses 
 the pavement, and is given over to antics. 
 
 " He's a traitor, blasphemer, and what's wuss'n those, 
 He puts all his atheism in drefful bad prose ! " 
 
 Nevertheless, my friends, or my foes — if I have 
 any — truth has an awkward way of getting a hearing 
 sooner or later, and, while some yell and bawl 
 " Question," others wait and listen. 
 
 The plunderers were astute men in that age of 
 systematic plunder. Doubtless they had foreseen 
 what was coming. The spoil of the chantries and 
 hospitals and gilds had given them a grand haul ; 
 but if there was more to get, why should not they 
 have it ? So an Act was passed that all such books 
 heretofore used or still preserved in the churches, 
 and all images, pictures, and other ornaments as 
 being " things corrupt . . . vain, and superstitious, 
 and, as it were, a preparation to superstition," should 
 be destroyed, burnt, or otherwise defaced. But the 
 
 6
 
 66 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 scramble had begun long before this. Why should 
 people wait for the clumsy machinery of Parliament 
 to be set in motion ? There was such a general and 
 widespread anticipation of what was coming that 
 almost immediately after the death of King Henry 
 men of all classes began to fall upon the spoil. 
 Sometimes the churchwardens themselves were 
 authorised to lay hands on the church goods, and 
 were not slow to use their opportunities ; sometimes 
 commissioners were sent down to the parishes from 
 the council ; sometimes emissaries from the bishops 
 appear to have taken part in the confiscation. In 
 three years it may be said that almost all the parish 
 churches in England had been looted ; before the 
 end of the King's reign there had been a clean 
 sweep of all that was worth stealing from the parish 
 chests, or the church walls, or the church treasuries. 
 In the next generation there were churches by the 
 score that possessed not even a surplice ; there were 
 others that had not even a chalice ; and others again 
 in considerable numbers which were described as 
 "ruinated," When the Second Book of Homilies 
 was issued in 1562 already we find the homilist 
 indignantly exclaiming : " It is a sin and shame to 
 see so many churches so ruinous and so foully 
 decayed, almost in every corner. . . . Suffer them 
 not," he adds, " to be defiled with rain and weather,
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 67 
 
 with dung of doves and owls, stares and choughs, 
 and other filthiness, as it is foul and lamentable 
 to behold in many places of this country." And 
 yet what else could have been looked for ? The 
 great pillage was nothing less than this — the Disen- 
 dowment of all the Parishes in England. Nothing 
 was left to the parish community but the bare walls 
 of the church fabric, stripped of every " thing of 
 beauty " on which the eyes had delighted to rest. 
 No church was allowed to retain more than a single 
 bell. The beautiful art of campanology almost died 
 out. The organs were sold for the price of the 
 pipes; the old music, the old melodies, were hushed, 
 for praising God in an unknown tongue was pro- 
 hibited. The old gatherings in the gildhalls came 
 to an end. 
 
 It is nonsense, it is absolutely contrary to fact, to 
 say that it was owing to the suppression of the 
 monasteries that new devices were resorted to to 
 save the poor from starving. Pauperism came in, 
 not by the Suppression of the Monasteries, but by 
 the Disendownient of the Parishes. 
 
 Compare the churchwardens' accounts of any 
 county parish in the fifteenth century with those of 
 the same parish in the seventeeth or eighteenth, and 
 what a change has come over the scene 1 In the 
 earlier documents, when we have learnt to read
 
 68 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 them aright, there is interest and HveHness in every 
 Hne. In the later ones there are everywhere indi- 
 cations that the parishioners are only vying with 
 one another to keep down the rates ; the lead is sold 
 off the roof and replaced by thatch ; there is hig- 
 gling between one party and another party as to 
 whether twopence or threepence a dozen shall be 
 paid for sparrows or their eggs ; there is a division, 
 decided in the negative, as to whether there shall be 
 a new rope to ring the solitary bell ; there is a 
 squabble about the fences of the churchyard ; there 
 is a presentment that hogs were rooting up the 
 graves ; the parish meeting is attended by threes 
 and fours, there is an atmosphere of meanness and 
 squalor pervading the shrivelled assemblies. The 
 one piece of property that remains to the parishioners 
 is the parish church : only the ghost of the old 
 parish community survived. 
 
 Then came a time w^hen some cunning parishioners 
 here and there began to see a chance of getting rid 
 of their liabilities as parishioners, and began to feel 
 "conscientious objections" to contribute to the 
 maintenance of the fabric in which they seldom or 
 ever appeared. The Quakers showed the fir.it 
 example : it was soon followed. Thus far the 
 parishes were only disendowed^ it remained for 
 them to be disestablished. That began when, as the
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 69 
 
 phrase is, church rates were abolished — i.e., when 
 no one who objected to contribute to the main- 
 tenance of the church could be compelled to pay 
 for the use of it. As I read, that act was a bribe 
 to people not to belong to the old parish com- 
 munity. 
 
 But the end came when the Local Government 
 Act of 1894 became the law of the land. By that 
 Act the old parish communities were formally dis- 
 established. The parish was defined to he'' a. place 
 for which a separate overseer is or can be appointed." 
 In the new parish council or parish meeting the 
 parish priest as such has no locus standi, nor have 
 the churchwardens : the old constitution of the 
 parish community has gone. 
 
 Meanwhile the parish churches remain. Again 
 I ask, as I have often asked before. To whom do the 
 churches belong ? There are some at any rate in 
 every " place for which a separate overseer is or can 
 be appointed" who still are joyfully willing to take 
 upon themselves the liability to keep the church in 
 repair ; some who gladly avail themselves of the 
 privilege of worshipping in the old houses of God 
 where generations of their fathers worshipped during 
 centuries gone by ; some who have no wish to 
 interfere with the liberty of conscience and the free- 
 dom of worship which others so strongly claim.
 
 70 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 But these men and women have their rights too, 
 and one of these rights is that they shall not be 
 liable to be interfered with, or their liberty be 
 restricted by every noisy brawler who may object, 
 or choose to protest, against the ritual sanctioned 
 by ecclesiastical authority, or the doctrine wisely or 
 unwisely preached in the churches maintained at 
 the " worshippers' " cost. 
 
 Some of us seeing things as they are, and accept- 
 ing the logic of facts, are not afraid of their parishes 
 being disestablished, any more than they are scared 
 when compelled to confess that they were disen- 
 doived three centuries ago. Some of us are quite 
 awake to the fact that the disestablishment of the 
 Church is one thing, and that the disestablishment 
 of the parish is quite another. But we who take 
 up this position do think strongly that the time has 
 come when the ownership of the churches up and 
 down the land should be handed over to somebody, 
 and they count it an outrage and a monstrous in- 
 justice that every religious body in this land of ours 
 should be able to claim its place of worship as its 
 own, whether that body be Jew or Gentile, Roman, 
 Greek, or Mormonite, Quaker, Wesleyan, Muggle- 
 tonian, or Independent, but that they who for the 
 present have the use of the, say, 20,000 parish 
 churches in England should be enjoying that use
 
 BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE 71 
 
 on little more than sufferance, and should not be 
 able to call their churches their own. 
 
 " Why can't we get the Bishops to move ? " asks 
 one and another. ''They are our leaders, they 
 ought to know their own mind ! " Alas ! only once 
 in the history of the Reformed Church of England 
 have the Bishops as a body known their own mind ; 
 then, when those seven were thrown into the Tower 
 — and then the hearts of Englishmen throbbed 
 with a mighty burst of enthusiastic loyalty — the 
 nation rose up as one man to acknowledge with 
 gratitude the heroism of their episcopal leaders. 
 Alas ! again I say alas ! there was another occasion 
 when the Bishops as a body " knew their own 
 minds." It was when twenty Bishops in the House 
 of Lords voted solid against Lord Grey's second 
 Reform Bill. There was only one dissentient ! 
 The Bill was thrown out for that time : but what 
 next ? 
 
 The Anglican Bishops of this Reformed Church 
 of England never have started any forward move- 
 ment : they have followed public opinion, not led 
 it. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 
 the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the 
 Church Missionary Society did not enter upon their
 
 72 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND 
 
 several magnificent careers at the suggestion of our 
 Bishops. Even in that glorious war against the 
 accursed horrors of slavery were they the Bishops 
 who led the van ? Of late years things have gone 
 from bad to worse ; we expect from " our leaders " 
 such restless activity (if that is the word) as leaves 
 no time for serious thought — such perpetual 
 " serving of tables " as, according to the Twelve 
 Apostles, was inconsistent with the exercise of the 
 higher Apostolic functions. We need statesman- 
 ship, and we look for it in vain. 
 
 Now, as heretofore, the hope of the future of the 
 Anglican Church in this crisis that we all have to 
 face is to be sought elsewhere than in the leadership 
 of those whom we should all be glad and proud to 
 follow, if they would or could lead us. ^ 
 
 Note. — While the Council of Constance was holding its 
 sessions for the Reform of the Church and other good pur- 
 poses, the English Bishops gave a banquet to the Burghers of 
 the city on S««dfl>', January 24, 1417, "followed by a 'Comoedia 
 sacra,' evidently a sort of mystery play in Latin on the subject 
 of tlie nativity of Christ, the worship of the magi, and the 
 worship of the Holy Innocents." [Life of Robert Hallani, 
 Bishop of Salisbury, in the Did. of Nat. Biography.']
 
 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION
 
 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 BEFORE THE RE FORM A TION 
 
 IT has long been felt that an increasing number 
 of candidates for Holy Orders in the Church of 
 England are young men who have received but 
 an inadequate training for the ministry, and that 
 the daily routine of duties expected from the 
 younger clergy is distinctly unfavourable to the 
 growth of any habits of study. Among themselves, 
 too, there is a conviction that it is becoming very 
 hard, almost impossible, for them to keep abreast 
 of the learning and culture that is going on around 
 them, and that, while other professions and other 
 classes of the community are becoming more 
 studious, well-informed, and better instructed, they 
 are unhappily dropping behind. 
 
 It was to meet so serious a danger as this that, in 
 1893, some leading professors and tutors in the 
 University of Oxford issued an invitation to such 
 of the clergy as were so inclined, to spend a fort- 
 
 75
 
 76 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 night at Oxford, where a certain measure of hospi- 
 tality would be offered by several of the colleges, 
 and where, brought into touch with academic life 
 and academic thought, they might be afforded the 
 opportunity of learning from the Divinity Professors 
 and others what were the latest results of research 
 and inquiry arrived at by professional students in 
 the domains of Exegesis, Scientific Theology, and 
 History. 
 
 The Oxford experiment proved successful ; and 
 during the Long Vacation of 1894 it was repeated 
 at Cambridge. The lecturers who took part in the 
 movement were professors of the University, and 
 such scholars and men of learning as were believed 
 to have something to say, and to be in some sort 
 specialists in this or that line of study. I could not 
 but feel gratified when a request was made to me 
 that I should deliver one of these lectures. The 
 subject was left to me, and the novelty of it com- 
 mended itself to the Committee. Since its delivery 
 I have been asked by many to publish it. 
 
 With some few excisions it is printed pretty much 
 as it was delivered. 
 
 By the term Parish Priest we understand an 
 official responsible for the spiritual oversight of the
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 77 
 
 inhabitants of a certain geographical area which we 
 call the Parish. 
 
 But here we are at once face to face with a 
 problem surrounded with difticulties. 
 
 In the first five centuries at least after Christ, the 
 word irapoiKia was used almost exclusively to denote 
 what we now call the Bishop's Diocese. The 
 province of Gaul — meaning by that the great 
 stretch of country now embracing Belgium and 
 France — was in the fifth century divided into some 
 sixty odd civitates ; and though I am not prepared 
 to say that each civitas had its bishop, yet it is, in 
 the main, true that to every civitas a bishop had 
 already been assigned, whose stool (as Mr. Freeman 
 was pleased to phrase it) was set up in the chief 
 town of that civitas. The chief town gave him his 
 title ; the civitas was his irapoiKta or parish. 
 
 It is to be remembered that, as in the Apostolic 
 age the work of converting the world started from 
 the great towns, so was this emphatically the case 
 in Gaul. How early or how late the practice became 
 general of calling the country cure the Parish and 
 the Episcopal See the Diocese I have never been 
 able to discover. As early as the fourth century we 
 find mention of country churches with lands belong- 
 ing to them, and in the next century the numbers of 
 these foundations so much increased that Sidonius
 
 78 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 (a.d. 433-488) mentions a visitation he made of 
 the rural churches in his diocese (Auvergne), and 
 we notice that by this time these settlements are 
 sometimes called Parochice and sometimes Dioceses. 
 Later on, Gregory of Tours (a.d. 539-593) more 
 often calls the country cures Dioceses and the 
 Episcopal See the Parochia. But, call them what 
 you will, we are fairly well instructed as to the 
 manner in which the country parishes (as we call 
 them now) rose up in Gaul ; and I have a suspicion 
 that what was true of Gaul was true, mutatis 
 mutandis, of Britain. I have a suspicion that if we 
 had for British history anything approaching to that 
 wealth of original sources which we have for early 
 French history during the first five or six centuries 
 of our era, we should have evidence that some — 
 perhaps many — of our English parishes existed as 
 ecclesiastical parishes, with pretty much the same 
 boundaries as they have to-day, and are survivals 
 of a condition of affairs anterior to the Saxon 
 Conquest. I 
 
 Be that as it may, however, there are indications 
 that the parish priest all through the Saxon times 
 held a position of greater independence relatively 
 
 ' Compare Haddan and Stubbs' "Councils," i. 124, "British 
 Church Endowments claimed by the Saxon Church."
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 79 
 
 to the bishops than he held on the other side of the 
 Channel. 
 
 Two of these indications are worth drawing your 
 attention to for more than one reason, (i) Among 
 us in pre-Norman times Archdeacons are hardly 
 heard of. Bishop Stubbs reminds us that the first 
 person who is called archdeacon is Wulfred, who 
 became Archbishop of Canterbury in 805 ; and he 
 adds that the office of archdeacon is only once 
 mentioned in the Northumbrian Priest's Laws. 
 
 The fact is so significant that I must beg you to 
 pardon a digression (which is really not a digression) 
 while I try to explain the significance. 
 
 You all remember that in the Apostolic age it was 
 found necessary very early to appoint deacons, who 
 were to be the administrators of the finances of the 
 Church. In the same way it came to pass that, 
 when the revenues of the bishops in Gaul became 
 almost unwieldy, it became necessary that the 
 revenues of the see should be placed under the 
 management and supervision of an official who 
 should regulate the expenditure and its distribution, 
 keep the very voluminous accounts, and strike the 
 annual debit and credit balance. 
 
 This was all the more necessary in Gaul, because 
 all the endowments in a diocese were paid into the 
 episcopal exchequer and were under the bishop's
 
 8o THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 control. He apportioned to each priest his income, 
 and, even where local funds were forthcoming, the 
 priest resident in a certain cure was required to 
 account for such rents or dues as were derived from 
 local sources, presumably paying the balance, if any, 
 to the common chest of the diocese. The accounts 
 in all cases were sent in to the archdeacon ; and if I 
 may be allowed the expression, the archdeacon 
 would annually present his Budget to the bishop, 
 whose First Lord of the Treasury or Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer he was. 
 
 This, I say, was the case in Gaul. It seems that 
 no such unification of diocesan revenues ever existed 
 in Britain. If anything of the kind had prevailed 
 among us in Anglo-Saxon times we must have heard 
 of the archdeacon's work or of the archdeacon's 
 office. As it is, we hear almost nothing of the one 
 or the other till after the Norman Conquest, and 
 then we hear a great deal too much. But then the 
 titular and territorial archdeacon has become an 
 altogether different kind of functionary from him 
 with whom we are concerned when we speak of the 
 earlier archdeacons in the Galilean Church. 
 
 (2) Besides the archdeacons there was another 
 class of clergy whom we hear nothing of in England 
 till late in the eighth century, but of whom we are 
 perpetually hearing in Gaul almost from the earliest 
 times — I mean the Canons.
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 8i 
 
 The first instance of the very name canons occur- 
 ring in Enghsh history is in the report of two 
 bishops who were sent into Britain in 789 by Pope 
 Adrian the First, and who were the first ambassadors 
 or (if you choose to call them by the term which 
 acquired a certain disagreeable meaning in the later 
 times) the first legaies who came to spy out the land 
 since the famous mission of Augustine two centuries 
 before. I And here again I am compelled to say 
 something to explain who these canons were. For 
 we hear so much of the canons in later times, of the 
 rivalry between them and the monks, and of their 
 relation to the parish priests, that it is almost impos- 
 sible to understand the ecclesiastical history of these 
 times — or indeed of later times either — until we get 
 something like a clear notion of who and what these 
 canons were. 
 
 As I have said before, the Gallican bishops were 
 very wealthy and very powerful territorial magnates ; 
 they were, in fact, what many prelates in Austria 
 are called to this day — Prince-Bishops. The setting 
 
 ' "This is probably the first use of the word caitonici in 
 the sense of canons hving in communities, but without monastic 
 vows, that occurs in English Church history ; indeed, the 
 rule of Chrodogang, the first canonical rule, was onlj' published 
 about fifty years before this, and the title docs not become 
 common until much later." Haddaii and Stubbs' "Councils 
 and Ecclesiastical Documents," iii. 461. 
 
 7
 
 82 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 apart of separate estates for tlie maintenance of 
 clergy in this or that manor or district was hardly 
 heard of even so late as the fifth century. The 
 earliest authoritative ordinance laying it down that 
 every rural district should have a parsonage-houso 
 and that only after the building of that house 
 should the bishop allow a priest to take possession 
 of the church and officiate there, is to be found in a 
 Capitular of Louis le Debonnaire — or, as we ought 
 to translate his name, Louis the Devout — in the 
 year 8i8 or 819.1 In the same Capitular there 
 follows an ordinance that in future in all new vlllcCy 
 where new churches were built, the tithes should be 
 bestowed upon those same churches — i.e., should 
 not be paid into the common chest of the episcopal 
 see. This appears to have been a novel arrange- 
 ment, and implies, I think, that a feeling was 
 growing against such centralisation of Church 
 revenues as tended to make the country clergy too 
 absolutely dependent upon their diocesan. Obvi- 
 ously the dealing with these huge revenues neces- 
 sitated the employment of a large staff of trained 
 subordinates engaged in mere office work, analogous 
 to what we understand among ourselves by the 
 Civil Service. This small army of officials was 
 
 ' "Capitularia Regum Francorum." Ed. Borct, 1883, section 
 138, § 10-12.
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 83 
 
 occupied mainly in dealing with the official business 
 of the see ; and, as there was a Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer as I have ventured to call him — the 
 archdeacon — so also there would be a certain 
 number of heads of departments or chief clerks, 
 who would be required to be more or less in strict 
 personal relations with the bishop from day to day. 
 These, as being more concerned with office work 
 than with pastoral work, were in the first instance, 
 and indeed for some centuries, called the Episcopal 
 Clerks, or Clcrici. They were entrusted with im- 
 portant responsibilities and sometimes very arduous 
 duties — education, church extension, discipline, and 
 the like, not to speak of the immense correspondence 
 which fell upon them and the delicate diplomacy 
 which they might be called on to undertake at an 
 hour's notice. These clerici were sure to be the 
 ablest and most efficient ecclesiastics in the diocese, 
 and had their residence in the episcopal house, 
 which soon got to be called the bishop's Palatium, 
 as the emperor's residence was called his Palatium, 
 the internal organisation of the one being modelled 
 upon that of the other. 
 
 In both cases the discipline of the palace was 
 necessarily as strict as the discipline of a man-of- 
 war; but in the bishop's palace that discipline would 
 assume an ecclesiastical and religious character.
 
 84 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 The great officials of the bishop's palace holding 
 high office were bound to conform to certain obser- 
 vances laid down in a certain code, differing in 
 different dioceses. But in all cases they lived by a 
 rule, a Kavwr, as the Greek word called it. Not 
 improbably on entering upon their office they 
 " kissed hands," as the Ministers of the Crown do 
 now, and undertook formally to observe the kovwv, 
 and so were included among the Canonici. 
 
 As time went on it became necessary to plant 
 more than one or two of these Government Houses, 
 as we may call them, in various parts of the diocese, 
 with a prior or superior as head ; such houses being 
 supposed to keep up the etiquette, and to observe 
 the rule or Kavwv of the episcopal Palatium. Little 
 by little the close connection between these houses, 
 lying at a distance from the central seat of govern- 
 ment became weakened. The discipline tended, 
 inevitably, to grow lax where the face of the bishop 
 was seldom seen, and his presence was not to be 
 feared. Gradually, too, the canons in the distant 
 houses were put upon their own resources, and were 
 allowed to appropriate to their own use — i.e., to the 
 support of the community — the revenues which in 
 the first instance they had been sent to administer 
 for diocesan purposes. Then a worse development 
 ensued. The canons in the outlying houses pro-
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 85 
 
 ceeded to apportion among themselves these estates, 
 and each canon became a tenant for hfe of his share 
 of the estates. Then came in the practice of non- 
 residence. There was no longer a common table, 
 nor any life in common, and, in point of fact, the 
 canonry or prebend became only a better and more 
 lucrative benefice with little work and a good income 
 — more or less of a sinecure ; though it must be 
 allowed that such prizes were for the most part 
 bestowed upon the better educated of the clergy — 
 for the most part they were the prizes which fell to 
 the abler, the more cultivated, the more deserving. 
 
 Many attempts were made from time to time to 
 restore discipline in these canon's houses. Chrodo- 
 gang. Bishop of Metz, in the eighth century, drew up 
 a Rule for his Canonici, and this rule was adopted 
 by other bishops, who, under the authority of 
 Charlemagne's Admonitio Geueralis (a.d. 789),^ 
 attempted with more or less success to force it upon 
 their canons. Later, it seems that the canons them- 
 selves here and there showed a desire to return to a 
 better way ; and we find many of these corporations 
 associated, no one knows how, under a pretended 
 rule of St. Augustine, which they professed to 
 follow and conform to. These canons, who 
 observed a certain rule of life, which they were 
 
 ' It is printed by Borct in the "Capitularia," section 22.
 
 86 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 expected to obey even in small things, got to be 
 called the Canons Regular, or canons living together 
 under a rule ; while the others, who somehow were 
 in possession of the estates, and lived pretty much 
 as they pleased, were known as Secular Canons, or 
 canons ivho ivere living in the ivorld, and conforming 
 to the secular life under no particular rule or strict 
 canonical discipline. 
 
 Outside these canons, again, whether secular or 
 regular, were the monks or dwellers in the monas- 
 teries ; but about them, for many good reasons, I 
 can enter into no details now. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 Having indulged in these two digressions by way 
 of introduction, I am the better able to enter now 
 upon the main subject before us. 
 
 Our sources of information regarding the Anglo- 
 Saxon parish priests are not so meagre as is gene- 
 rally assumed by those who have not given their 
 attention to the subject. They may be said to begin 
 with those documents which belong to the days of 
 Archbishop Theodore, who came among us in 668, 
 and who continued to preside over the Church of 
 England till 690. ' Theodore's Penitential belongs 
 
 " It is a very horrible document. It may be found in 
 Haddan and Stubbs' "Councils," vol. iii. pp. 173-203. On 
 the subject of these Penitentials, see Bishop Stubbs' "Lectures 
 on Mediaeval and Modern History," p. 296.
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 87 
 
 to a class of documents which the Bishop of Oxford 
 describes as "Hsts of sins and their penances," drawn 
 up for a people only partially delivered from heathen 
 abominations and superstitions, and which had 
 already been issued by the Prankish bishops and 
 the Merovingian kings under their influence. These 
 penitentials were, indeed, private or quasi-^x'w^io. 
 compilations, and it was not till the eighth and 
 ninth centuries that even in Gaul they obtained the 
 force of legislative enactments. But, viewed as re- 
 flections of the age in which they were drawn up, 
 they are of inestimable value. Theodore's Fcni- 
 tential shows us that the organisation of the Church 
 in Britain was in many respects very unlike that of 
 Gaul, or as we might now call it, Frankland ; there 
 was, indeed, some discipline among the clergy, but 
 there was clearly more laxity than among their 
 brethren on the other side of the Channel. In some 
 important matters they did not conform to the 
 usages and practices of the Roman Church. 
 
 Sunday was strictly observed. The timber 
 churches were apparently often moved from one 
 place to another. Many oi the clergy knew no 
 Latin )- and, by what sounds like a compromise, it 
 was ordered that in future they should be required 
 at least to say the Creed and the Lord's Prayer and 
 ' See Green's " Making of England," p. 139.
 
 88 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 read the Lessons in that language. At the same 
 time, it is clear that these clergy were recognised as 
 the guides and teachers of the people, and that their 
 ministry was accepted with remarkable docility. 
 Their influence was an influence for good. Outside 
 the sphere in which these men were discharging 
 their functions there were monasteries, which were 
 the homes of such learning as was to be acquired 
 through the medium of Latin ; seminaries in which 
 the sons of wealthy men like the father of St. Boni- 
 face, the apostle of Germany, sent their boys to 
 receive the higher education. But the epistles of 
 St. Boniface show us that outside the cloisters the 
 people at large were instructed in the elements of 
 the Christian faith by the secular priests, and that 
 they were probably the teachers of that native poetry 
 which was always becoming more and more Christian 
 in its character — such poetry as the people were 
 generally familiar with, such as Boniface himself had 
 learnt in his youth and did not forget in his man- 
 hood, such too, as Beda loved and quoted on his 
 deathbed. It was in Theodore's time that, on the 
 24th of September, 673, a council was held at Hert- 
 ford, where all the Anglo-Saxon bishops except one 
 assembled ; and here, among other things, it was 
 resolved that in future a synod should be held 
 annually at a place called Clovesho, a place which
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 89 
 
 recent discoveries have gone far to show was situated 
 near Mildenhall, in Cambridgeshire; and the records 
 of at least ten of these Clovesho synods have been 
 preserved, bringing us down to the times when 
 the Danes were ravagmg the country with fire and 
 sword. 
 
 At one of these synods, held under the presidency 
 of Archbishop Cuthbert in 747 — i.e.^ about fifty years 
 after Theodore's death — the decrees, though, as usual, 
 in great part imported from abroad, contain some 
 enactments of peculiar interest. ^ The bishops are to 
 visit their several dioceses (Parochicv) every year to 
 make themselves known to their people, and to 
 warn them against heathen practices. They are to be 
 careful to ordain no one to the priesthood till they 
 are assured that the candidate is fitted by his life and 
 doctrine to act as a shepherd of souls (c. 6). The 
 priests themselves are (c. 8) to give themselves heart 
 and life to the ministry of the Word and Sacraments, 
 and to keep themselves from all worldly callings ; they 
 are to be diligent in visiting their people, and to be 
 sober in their talk and in their conduct (c. 9). They 
 are to explain the meaning of the Sacrament, translat- 
 ing to those who do not understand them the words 
 used in the prayers offered, and especially to teach 
 
 ' Haddan and Stubbs, "Councils and Documents," vol. iii. 
 p. 3^2.
 
 90 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 them the Creed and tlie Lord's Prayer and the 
 spiritual significance of the ritual, in which the people 
 were to bear a part (c. lo). They are warned against 
 any unauthorised departure from the order of ser- 
 vice. They are not to sing in the churches like the 
 heathen bards did, nor in theatrical fashion to play 
 tricks with sacred words, but to follow the established 
 order of plain song in a simple and serious manner, 
 and if they cannot sing (c. 12) they are to read dis- 
 tinctly, and unpretentiously. 
 
 These and other ordinances of the council the 
 bishops are to make known to all at their visitations, 
 and command all to observe, trying to correct that 
 which needs mending and enforce that which is 
 enjoined. 
 
 In the MS. records of this council which have 
 come down to us the names of the bishops only who 
 were present have been preserved. It is otherwise 
 with some other of the synods which were assembled 
 afterwards at Clovesho and elsewhere. 
 
 Thus, at a Clovesho council held on the 12th of 
 October, 803, under the presidency of Archbishop 
 ^thelheard, we get what appears to be a complete 
 list of those who were summoned and attended.^ 
 
 Thirteen bishops, including the Primate, were 
 present. The normal number of representatives 
 ' Haddan and Stubbs, u.s., iii. 541.
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 91 
 
 from each diocese (including the bishop of the 
 see) was seven. But among these seven the abbots 
 of the monasteries in the several dioceses appear to 
 have taken their seats as representatives of the regulars 
 or monastic bodies; though where there was no mon- 
 astery, as in the dioceses of Elmham and of Rochester, 
 the six who came with their bishop were all parish 
 priests. From Canterbury the single archdeacon 
 mentioned attends as a supernumerary. The num- 
 ber of signatures all told is ninety-three, of whom 
 the secular or parish priests are fifty-five, while the 
 regulars number only twenty-five. 
 
 Twenty-one years later — ix., when the incursions 
 of the Danes were beginning to cause serious anxiety 
 — we have the record of another Clovesho synod at 
 which Archbishop Wulfred presided. Eleven bishops 
 attended, and, according to one account, fifty parish 
 priests, though the signatures of only thirty-seven 
 have been preserved. The monasteries by this time 
 had suffered grievously in some parts of the country 
 from the Danes, and we need not be surprised that 
 no more than seven abbots were among the signa- 
 tories. The significance of these lists is very great. 
 It is clear that at the beginning of the ninth century 
 — thirty or forty years before Alfred was born — the 
 parish priests were by no means the poor creatures 
 that a cursory reader of such history as emanated
 
 93 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 from the cloisters would lead us to believe they 
 were. On the contrary, there were among them 
 men of consideration and weight who were perfectly 
 qualified to take their places in council side by side 
 with the greatest abbots in the land, to travel from 
 one end of England to the other that their voices 
 might be heard in the debates, and, moreover, when 
 the religious houses had been harried and burnt 
 by the Vikings, these same priests were ready to 
 fill up the vacant seats in the assemblies of the 
 Church and to rally round their bishops whenever 
 and withersoever they might be summoned to attend 
 and deliver their judgments or tender their advice in 
 times of peril and perplexity. 
 
 Unhappily, so great has been at all times the 
 exclusiveness and arrogance which have character- 
 ised monastic literature, and especially when monks 
 have been writing about the past of their own houses 
 or their own Order, that they have taken little or no 
 account of the parish priests and their doings ; but 
 have adopted when speaking of them precisely the 
 same tone which is observable in the language of 
 some among ourselves. The very name of secular 
 clergy was to the monk almost a name of reproach ; 
 and, just as among our Nonconformists nowadays 
 no man is a "member of a Christian Church" ex- 
 cept he be a member of a Dissenting congregation,
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 93 
 
 SO, for centuries, only they who were members of a 
 monastic body and under monastic vows were 
 spoken of as religions. Then, and then only, was 
 he or she (as the case might be) said to have " en- 
 tered religion." The phrase is still used in the 
 present day. 
 
 Meanwhile, all through the Anglo-Saxon era we 
 find the parish priests quite able to hold their own 
 as teaching, preaching, working clergymen. In the 
 monasteries the Latin language appears to have 
 been used as a rule, and among them the Roman 
 ritual was universal. There are good reasons for 
 believing that in the parish churches the Latin 
 service was disliked, and even translated into the 
 vernacular ; for everybody in Gaul could speak 
 Latin or understood it. In Britain the people loved 
 their own language ; to them the Roman speech was 
 jargon and something worse. 
 
 The people could not be induced to learn Latin 
 except in the monasteries and in some few schools 
 more or less in connection with them. It was the 
 interest of the parish priests to keep up the senti- 
 ment of the people in favour of their native 
 language, and the people icotild have translations 
 of the Scriptures, which the parish priests could
 
 94 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 supply and did supply ; and that there were among 
 those parish priests no inconsiderable number of 
 men deserving in that age to be called scholars and 
 students is abundantly evident. 
 
 Bede himself {ob. 732) acknowledges his great 
 obligations to a certain London priest — I suppose 
 we may call him a London clergyman — named 
 Nothelm, who had made transcripts for him of 
 valuable documents. Nothelm appears to have 
 been one of the most learned men of his time, and 
 eventually became Archbishop of Canterbury, dying 
 there in 739.^ In the British Museum, among the 
 Cotton MSS., we have a remarkable catalogue which 
 a certain Athelstan, in the pride of his heart, drew 
 up of the books which he had collected and was 
 apparently very proud of. Athelstan appears to have 
 lived about a generation after Bede. I hold him 
 to have been a country parson, and shall continue 
 to assert and maintain the same till some personage 
 of adequate audacity shall succeed in proving the 
 negative. Athelstan names with a certain serious 
 joy two important volumes which he says he had 
 obtained from another parish priest named Alfwold. 
 
 ' On Nothelm, see Mr. Plummer's " Bede," vol. ii. p. 2. He 
 was apparently in communication with Bede at least fifteen 
 or twenty years before Bede's death, and long before his own 
 promotion to the Episcopate.
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 95 
 
 But Athelstan and Alfwold are only two of many 
 such clergymen as were men of books and study in 
 that eighth century. Alcuin — of whom it may be 
 said that Charlemagne looked to him for effecting 
 the great educational reform which the illustrious 
 Emperor hoped to bring about — Alcuin writes of 
 England at this time as the home of libraries and 
 learned men. And this is just what our King Alfred 
 says of his country in the next century, when he 
 deplores the havoc and ruin which the Danes had 
 wrought. In the preface to Gregory's " Pastorale " he 
 mentions how " before all was spoiled and burned, 
 ihc churches throughout the ivhole English nation stood 
 filled with treasures and with books, and also with a 
 great multitude of God's servants ; " but he adds 
 elsewhere that, in making this very translation in 
 w^hich such a memorable lament occurs, he had 
 received important help, not only from Archbishop 
 Plegmund and Bishop Asser, but from two mass 
 priests — i.e., parish priests — whom he names. 
 
 But when the great King bewails the decay of 
 learning in Britain during the generation or so 
 preceding his own, we must take such laments with 
 some little reserve, just as we must receive the 
 language of -^Ifric the grammarian in the next 
 century with all cautious allowance ; for /Elfric 
 himself tells us that a parish priest was his own first
 
 96 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 teacher. And we may take it as pretty certain that 
 when yElfric wrote those homihes of his which 
 were so widely circulated, they were the parish 
 priests who bought them or copied them, and 
 preached them in their churches. People came 
 and listened to them too ; and preaching other 
 people's sermons is not such a very reprehensible 
 practice — it rather goes a little way to prove that 
 the preachers are not idlers, not drones. And let 
 me, before I pass on, remind you that the saintly 
 Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, was one of these 
 good people who busied themselves in writing 
 sermons for others to preach, and that he tells us 
 himself that he was no monk, but that he began his 
 career as a country parson quietly doing his best 
 for his people, making no bounce and never 
 dreaming of promotion. 
 
 Nor was the social position of the Saxon working 
 clergy by any means as low as some have been 
 inclined to infer from the silence or the covert 
 sneers of writers who breathed the air of the 
 cloisters. 
 
 There is in the " Cartularium Saxonicum " a very 
 interesting will, made by a certain priest named 
 Werhard, about the year 832.1 He describes him- 
 
 '" Cartularium Saxonicum." W. de Gray Birch, vol. i. 
 p. 558, No. 402.
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 97 
 
 self as a kinsman of Archbishop Wulfred, who had 
 lately died. The Archbishop had purchased some 
 property in Kent and Middlesex, which he made 
 over to Werhard in honourable trust. The income 
 was to be applied, not for the enrichment of any 
 monastery, but for the support of the poor in certain 
 parishes which are named. As for Werhard's own 
 property (which he expressly tells us was his 
 patrimony), that he bequeaths to Christ Church, 
 Canterbury. The monks at Christ Church took 
 very good care of their evidences, and to this we 
 owe our knowledge of Werhard ; his will was the 
 title to the lands he bequeathed to their house, and 
 if he had not so bequeathed it we should never 
 have heard of him or of Wulfred's bequest to the 
 poor. Exactly in the same way do we owe our 
 knowledge of another parish priest, Erdulf ("Cart." 
 ii., 589), to whom King Edred, Alfred's grandson, left 
 a life interest in a considerable estate. The re- 
 version of that estate devolved to the new Minster 
 at Winchester, and Erdulf's will, as a matter of 
 course, would be deposited among the archives of 
 the monastery. So, again, we owe our knowledge 
 of the bequests made to some parish priests by a 
 great personage named Byhrtric, because Byhrtric 
 left also large legacies to the Canterbury monasteries. 
 The great Alfred himself left legacies to fifty parish 
 
 8
 
 98 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 priests, as no doubt other rich men did from time to 
 time. 
 
 If the working clergy suffered, as of course they 
 did, by the frightful ravages of the Danes, they 
 certainly did not suffer to anything approaching the 
 extent that the monasteries suffered. How greatly 
 ihey suffered may be learnt by the Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle, where we read, under the year 870, 
 that Archbishop Ceolnoth " commanded his private 
 priests, and also some of the Vill priests, that they 
 should help the few monks who remained to do 
 God's service . . . for," it adds, "there was strife 
 and sorrow over England ; and therefore the clerks 
 remained with the monks." 
 
 I beg you to note these words. The Archbishop's 
 private priests in the one clause are the clerks of the 
 other, and they are the same Clerici whom we have 
 heard of before as secular canons ; that is, they are 
 the staff-officers or officials of the bishops, while the 
 Vill priests are the country parsons or parish priests, 
 with whom we are now immediately concerned. 
 
 It has been said that this entry in the Chronicle 
 marks the extinction of the old monasticism in 
 England. Extinction is, perhaps, too strong a 
 word ; but it is undoubtedly true that in this, the 
 first year of King Alfred's reign, things were at their 
 worst in the religious houses throughout the land.
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 99 
 
 It looks very much as if this measure of the Arch- 
 bishop's was a desperate attempt to fill the ruined 
 monasteries, where possible, with the secular or 
 parish clergy, rather than allow the conventual life 
 and the conventual buildings to be abandoned. 
 
 The attempt may be said to have proved a failure. 
 It was inevitable that it should be a failure ; for the 
 single reason that the secular clergy were as a rule 
 married men, and when they were draughted into 
 the old monasteries they took their wives and 
 children with them. This was not only true of the 
 parish priests, but it was true even of the secular 
 canons, if we may judge from the Rule of Chrodo- 
 gang. They, too, were bound originally by no 
 vows ; nor does the obligation of celibacy appear 
 to have been imposed upon them by any other 
 penalty than such as was enforced in the case of 
 fellows of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge fifty 
 years ago. 
 
 When, in the tenth century, the great revival of 
 monasticism came about all over Europe and the 
 wave of enthusiasm rolled on to England, then the 
 cry of the monks was loud against the scandal of 
 the old monasteries being filled by the secular 
 canons, and the contest between the one Order and 
 the other went on actually down to the Norman 
 Conquest. Five years before that event, Edward
 
 loo THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 the Confessor was engaged in building his famous 
 monastery at Westminster for monks who, with 
 their abbot at their head, officiated at the King's 
 funeral ; while Harold, who claimed the other's 
 crown, was building his famous college at Waltham 
 for secular canons, some of whom were, and all 
 might have been, married men. 
 
 It really seemed a matter of uncertainty down to 
 the coming of the Normans which were to gain the 
 day — the men of Rule, whose idol was the artificial 
 and unnatural life of celibates in the cloister, or the 
 men of Principle, whose contention was that the 
 law of Christ allowed of freedom, and who claimed 
 that Christ's ministers might be of Paul the celibate 
 or of Peter the married man, and yet both might be 
 of Christ and doing His work in the world. 
 
 During the first half of the eleventh century there 
 is good reason for believing that the secular clergy, 
 including the parish priests, in England had never 
 before been so numerous. Not only so, but that 
 relatively to the rest of the population they have never 
 since been so rich or occupied so strong a position. 
 In the Domsday Survey hardly more than 1,700 
 churches are mentioned, but it is agreed on all 
 hands that this represents very inadequately indeed
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION loi 
 
 the whole number that must have been in existence 
 at the time of the Conquest. That number must 
 certainly have run into thousands. Every one of 
 these churches had its endowments in the shape of 
 tithes and offerings. Every one had its glebe. 
 
 On the other hand, the monasteries had by no 
 means recovered from the devastation wrought by 
 the Danes. INIany of the smaller houses had been 
 entirely blotted out, and it may be doubted whether 
 there were forty monasteries worth mentioning that 
 were at this time in working order from the Tyne to 
 the Exe.i It may indeed almost be said that at this 
 time the parish priests had it all their own way; 
 and I am afraid that these clergy were none the 
 better for their prosperity, rather that their riches 
 had done them harm in more ways than one. 
 
 Soon the fashion began of founding new monas- 
 teries. The cry was raised that only by the revival 
 of the stricter religious life of the cloister could 
 priests and people be reformed. The tide turned 
 against the seculars. The monasteries rapidly 
 became wealthy corporations enriched by lands and 
 manors. In many instances the ownership of these 
 
 ' How large was the number of religious houses founded in 
 England during the period anterior to the Norman Conquest, 
 and how terrible the devastation wrought among tlicm by the 
 Danes, may be estimated approximately by referring to Mr. 
 Birch's " Fasti Monastici CEvi Saxonici," 1872.
 
 102 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 manors carried with it the patronage of the churches 
 upon tliose manors — i.e., the advowsons of many 
 parishes passed into the hands of the abbeys and 
 priories. Then we begin to hear of a very odious 
 form of trading in these benefices. The rectors 
 were in many cases compelled to pay an annual 
 rent or pension to the monastery, the compact 
 being made with the incumbent conditionally upon 
 his being admitted to his cure. Protests were made 
 against these simoniacal bargains and councils 
 legislated against them, but it still went on. Of 
 course the parishes, the parishioners, and the clergy 
 suffered injury and wrong ; but this was as nothing 
 to the mischief wrought by the appropriation of the 
 income of a benefice to the support of a monastery, 
 whereby the monasteries became the rectors of the 
 parish, taking the whole endowment and leaving the 
 inhabitants of the place to the care of a stipendiary. 
 This kind of spoliation went on wholesale for more 
 than two centuries, till at last thoughtful and right- 
 thinking men lifted up their voices against the 
 abomination, and by the middle of the fifteenth 
 century the appropriations began to be discouraged, 
 but not before well-nigh half the benefices in 
 England had been plundered of their great tithes 
 and glebe lands. 
 
 Concurrently with this process of disendowment,
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 103 
 
 the wealth of the clergy had made them fair game 
 for those in power to levy from them all sorts of 
 exactions, civil and ecclesiastical. 
 
 Twice a year they were compelled, or supposed, 
 to attend the Diocesan Synods, and, whether they 
 attended or not, they had to pay their fees, and 
 perhaps higher fees for non-attendance. By this 
 time, too, the archdeacons had become active 
 diocesan inspectors, and their courts of inquiry 
 were very terrible assemblies, at which heavy dues 
 had to be paid to the officials. You catch a glimpse 
 in Chaucer of the Archdeacon's Summoner or 
 "Sompnour" in the "Friar's Tale." The summoner 
 was a common informer who lived by his vile 
 trade, and woe to the luckless parson who had 
 incurred the enmity of some aggrieved parishioner 
 looking out for a chance of paying off an old 
 grudge against the rector or vicar who had been 
 too zealous or a trifle indiscreet. The best he could 
 do was to bribe the summoner not to bring his 
 cause into court, where, even if the parson gained 
 the day, the expenses might easily cripple him for 
 months or years. 
 
 Then there were the taxes (for we may as well 
 use our modern language), those terrible tenths and 
 fifteenths of which we hear so much. In the year 
 1294 Edward the First actually demanded lialf a
 
 104 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 year's income from the clergy, and, dreadful as the 
 impost was, it had to be paid, though how the 
 parsons found the money it is difficult to imagine. 
 
 By this time, however, the country parsons had 
 almost ceased to be married men, though we meet 
 with them frequently till quite the end of the 
 thirteenth century. After that the archdeacons and 
 the summoners between them effectually put a stop 
 to holy matrimony among the priests of the Lord. 
 
 Nor did the steady progress of impoverishment 
 of the working clergy end with the appropriations, 
 the fees, and the taxes, ordinary and extraordinary. 
 The friars had not long been working in England 
 before they were found to be acting very seriously 
 in the direction of lessening the income of the 
 clergy, and especially of the town clergy, so far as 
 their resources were derived from freewill offerings 
 and the like. 
 
 Finally, the incomes of the clergy derivable from 
 tuition and educational work fell off seriously with 
 the development of the universities. Lads of pro- 
 mise began more and more to be sent from home 
 to take up their residence at Cambridge or Oxford 
 for better tuition than the parochial clergy could 
 provide, and that happened which has come about 
 in our own time — viz., that the income of the 
 country parsons greatly decreased when the demand
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 105 
 
 for clerical private tutors well-nigh came to an 
 end. 
 
 It is hardly to be wondered at if, as all these 
 worries and exactions, this gradual shrinkage in 
 the clerical incomes, went on so steadily, we should 
 find indications of the social position of the country 
 clergy beginning to decline towards the end of the 
 fourteenth century. And these indications are not 
 to be mistaken. 
 
 Taking the lists of presentations to our Norfolk 
 benefices, which go back to the thirteenth century, 
 and which in the main give the succession of 
 incumbents in the East Anglian diocese down to 
 the present day, and examining these lists as I 
 find them in a single volume of Blomefield's history 
 of the county, the following results must strike any 
 reader : — 
 
 The great family of the Bardolfs were lords of 
 the manor of Cantley, on the river Yare, from 
 Norman times down to the reign of Henry the 
 Fourth. As lords of the manor they were patrons 
 of the rectory, and they resided in the parish. The 
 rectors for nearly two centuries were either Bardolfs 
 or bore the names of the great county families. The 
 last of these aristocratic parsons of Cantley, as I 
 may call them, was presented in 1372. After that 
 date the rectors are evidently plebeians, of whose 
 origin we know nothing.
 
 io6 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 The same is true in the neighbouring parish of 
 Plumstead Parva. Down to 1360 the patrons 
 appear to have always presented one of their own 
 kindred. After that date the rectors are taken from 
 a lower stratum. 
 
 At Barton, again, where the ancient family of the 
 Lo veils were resident and patrons of the living till 
 late in the seventeenth century, the first four rectors 
 whose appointment is recorded are Lovells — that is, 
 the living was a family living, which was always held 
 by some younger brother or poorer kinsman. After 
 1349 there are no more Lovells to be found among 
 the rectors, nor any one else of whom there is any- 
 thing to tell. 
 
 Once more. The rectory of St. Mary Beecham- 
 well was for ages in the gift of presentation of the 
 Chervilles (another of the proud old houses), and 
 for generations they appear to have presented the 
 benefice to one of their own class. After the 
 presentation of Thomas Cherville by his father or 
 brother Robert de Cherville about the middle of 
 the fourteenth century, the parsons are evidently 
 new men, and few of them even bear Norfolk 
 names. If these instances stood alone, they would 
 be suggestive ; but they do not by any means stand 
 alone, and I commend this line of research to those 
 who possess or have access to our great county
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 107 
 
 histories, or such valuable works as Mr. Hingeston- 
 Randolph's " Registers of the Diocese of Exeter." I 
 can only glance at the subject here. 
 
 Nevertheless, though the parish priests were 
 growing poorer and poorer from the Conquest to 
 the Reformation, it is noticeable that they never 
 ceased to retain the confidence and esteem of their 
 people from first to last. My impression is that, as 
 they ceased to belong to the gentry class by birth, 
 they grew into more and more favour with the 
 commonalty. In the thousands of early charters 
 — i.e., conveyances of land and the like — which I 
 have had the eccentric pleasure of handling and 
 reading in my leisure hours, the names of the 
 county parsons actually swarm among the feoffees 
 or trustees to whom settled estates, small or large, 
 are conveyed. So, too, in the wills of the four- 
 teenth and fifteenth centuries the parish priests are 
 so frequently appointed supervisors of wills that it 
 is evident they were regarded as the men most to be 
 trusted for settling any such disputes as might arise 
 between executors and legatees. As for instances of 
 their putting pressure upon the dying that so some 
 benefits might accrue to themselves, I can only say 
 that I have never met with a single instance of any- 
 thing of the kind, though for thirty years I have 
 been on the watch for one, and 1 have examined
 
 loS THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 and made extracts from a good many wills and 
 testaments in my time. There's no accounting for 
 tastes, and some monomaniacs have a taste even for 
 old wills ! 
 
 On the other hand, when we come to the wills of 
 the clergy themselves, we see that though among 
 them there were all those differences in wealth, birth, 
 culture, and habits of life which are to be found 
 among the beneficed clergy nowadays, from the 
 successful pluralist who held two or three pieces 
 of preferment simultaneously or the rollicking 
 squarson who hung loosely to his clerical income 
 because he had landed property of his own, down 
 to the humble vicar who had hard work to make 
 two ends meet, or the needy chaplain who had only 
 his few household utensils and half a dozen shabby 
 books to leave behind him, yet it is the rarest thing 
 to meet with a parson's will in which some legacy 
 is not left to the church in which he officiates. 
 
 And here let me observe in passing that it is a 
 deep-rooted delusion, against which I have made 
 it my business to protest for many years, that the 
 great landlords forsooth built all our mediaeval 
 churches. I hold that to be an utter and mis- 
 chievous delusion. Everything goes to show that 
 the immense majority of the old churches of 
 England were built not by the great men, but by
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 109 
 
 the small people with the clergy at their head. 
 Where some great noble or county magnate did 
 build a church, there you may always find his 
 mark ; his coat armour is sure to be carved upon 
 every available stone or beam ; it tells its own tale. 
 But the small folk and the large majority of the four- 
 teenth-century parsons had no escutcheon to display, 
 and the sculptor amused himself in something else 
 than heraldic shields carved upon the battlements of 
 a tower. In the famous " Black Book of Swaffham" 
 in Norfolk, where the names of the chief benefactors 
 to the church are set down with rare minutenesses, 
 there appear the names of not less than nine rectors 
 and vicars of the parish who, in a period of less 
 than a century, had very materially contributed to 
 the sustentation of the fabric of the church (one of 
 the finest in Norfolk), and had restored some really 
 splendid gifts in the shape of service books, plate, 
 vestments, candlesticks, and ornaments of all kinds 
 for rendering the ritual and the service of the 
 sanctuary as splendid and imposing as it could be 
 made. John Bury, appointed rector of the parish 
 in 1414, actually built the chancel as we see it now. 
 He evidently intended to rebuild the whole church, 
 but he was cut short in the middle of his work, and 
 in his will he provided for the ceiling of the chancel 
 with panels. He left his successor to complete what
 
 no THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 he himself had begun. That successor was a parson 
 of some note in his time, a D.D., whose name was 
 John Botewright. This gentleman accepted the 
 honourable charge which Mr. Bury had laid upon 
 him, and he continued the building of the church ; 
 but he, too, left the work incomplete, and once 
 again the vicar of the parish, Robert Fuller, did as 
 the other clergy of the town had done before him, 
 spending upon it a sum quite equal to ;^5oo of our 
 money. 
 
 I should be glad to discover that when the church 
 was at last finished (as it is said), in the reign of 
 Henry the Seventh, Giovanni de Gigli, whom Le 
 Neve profanely calls John Giggles, an Italian, non- 
 resident rector of Swaffham and a great pluralist, 
 who ended by being Bishop of London — I should, 
 I say, be glad to discover that this Right Rev. 
 Father in God gave of his abundance to help on 
 the church-building ; but I should be very much 
 surprised indeed to hear this kind of good report 
 of him. 
 
 Such documents as the " Black Book of Swaff- 
 ham" are of extreme rarity, but evidence con- 
 firmatory of the part which the parsons took in 
 the church-building exists in abundance. It only 
 requires to be looked up and looked into. 
 
 People seem to forget that the churches in
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION ill 
 
 England during the centuries we are discussing 
 belonged to the parishioners exactly as the Board 
 schools do now, and that this proprietary interest 
 brought with it not only a jealous pride in their 
 churches, but a strong love for and delight in the 
 buildings themselves. Periodically there seems to 
 have burst forth a great craze for church restoration 
 over wide districts, one does not know how. Thus, 
 in the diocese of Exeter, the bishop was called upon 
 to re-dedicate between the years 1259 and 1268 — 
 actually in nine years — no less than eighty-eight 
 rebuilt or enlarged churches.^ A century later a 
 similar wave of zeal for church-building passed over 
 East Anglia. You may see the result everywhere in 
 the large numbers of fourteenth-century churches, 
 which in Norfolk and Suffolk unhappily, as I think, 
 supply the places of edifices erected when ecclesias- 
 tical architecture was in its perfect beauty, and 
 before the decadence of the greatest of all the arts 
 had begun. If a bishop were animated with a zeal 
 for having fine churches in his diocese, he could 
 put quite terrible pressure upon a parish, and put 
 the parishioners to very serious expense. The 
 coming of such a prelate was exactly like one of 
 
 ' Sccthc"Registcrsof Walter Broncscomhc [a. D. 1257-1280], 
 Bishop of Exeter." By the Rev. F. C. Hingcston-Kandolph. 
 (Bell & Sons, 8vo, 1889.) Preface, p, xii.
 
 112 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools nowadays. 
 " My Lords require you to enlarge your school and 
 to provide a class-room 1 " Alas ! what lamenta- 
 tions follow ! Take an instance or two. 
 
 Bishop Stapeldon had come down and paid a 
 visit to the church of Staverton, near Totnes, in 
 1301. He had found some fault with the accommoda- 
 tion in the nave of the church, and apparently made 
 some recommendations. When he came again in 
 July, 1314, his lordship was evidently out of temper 
 and dissatisfied. He would not be trifled with this 
 time. He declared that the chancel was too narrow 
 and dark, and the nave was worse. Wherefore he 
 made order that the rector, the vicar, and the 
 parishioners, should remedy these defects without 
 delay, and you may depend upon it it had to be 
 done at whatever inconvenience.^ Some years 
 later, the bishop paid a visit to Bradninch, near 
 Collumpton. He found the roof of the church in 
 a bad state (as Mr. Inspector has found perhaps 
 yours or mine), and the parishioners are peremptorily 
 ordered to put it in a condition of complete repair, 
 and are allowed six months to do it in. As for the 
 ways and means, that was their concern ! Just about 
 
 ' "The Register of Walter de Stapeldon, Bishop of Exeter 
 (1307-1326)." By Rev. F, C. Hingeston-Randolph, 1892, p. 379.
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 113 
 
 the same time, again, the bishop appeared at Ilfra- 
 combe.i It had been represented to him that the 
 parish church was too small. His lordship declared 
 that was his opinion also. Wherefore it was ordered 
 that the parishioners should lengthen their church 
 twenty-four feet at least before next Michaelmas 
 twelvemonth. Was there any penalty ? Yes, there 
 was ; and in this case the penalty in default of 
 carrying out the bishop's order was a sum of money 
 to be paid to the mother church at Exeter, equivalent 
 to an amount which in our time would be represented 
 by ;^7oo or ;^8oo. 
 
 But how did the unhappy creatures get the money ? 
 For instance, how did the poor people of Broad- 
 hempston — a little country parish of 2,000 acres — 
 manage to build a brand new church on a larger 
 scale than the old one, in the year 1401, and finish 
 it in two years ? How did the parishioners of 
 Buckland Brewer in 1399, when their church 
 and almost all its contents were destroyed by 
 lightning — how did they propose to build or repair 
 the sacred edifice ? How did the parishioners of 
 Downe St. Mary in 1413 and many another little 
 place that might be named — how did they all 
 manage it ; and manage it, too, without being re- 
 duced to beggary ? Why, exactly as you and I 
 
 ' U.S.. p. 182. 
 9
 
 114 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 do it now ! The bishop, in cases where the poor 
 people sued humbly to him, and told him they were 
 absolutely and utterly unable to bear the expense, 
 gave them leave and licence to go a-begging. And 
 who was the man who had to do the bulk of the 
 work ? And, mind, it was very hard work indeed, 
 in days when the roads were bad and the penny 
 post had not been dreamt of even by the most 
 imaginative. The man who did the work then, 
 as now, was the parson. And how well he did it 
 the houses of God in the land testify from John 
 o' Groat's House to the Land's End. 
 
 Before I close I must needs offer you one or two 
 more hints and suggestions. 
 
 (i) The lists of ordinations in the several dioceses 
 during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which 
 have come down to us are more numerous than might 
 have been expected. They show that the number 
 of ordained persons of all ranks was very large, 
 and they show us also plainly that instances of parish 
 priests living isolated and lonely lives must have 
 been rare. There were huge numbers of unbeneficed 
 men picking up a precarious livelihood in town and 
 country, and subsisting upon a pittance which only 
 celibates could have managed to exist upon. The
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 115 
 
 prizes were to the blanks even fewer than they are 
 now. But this had its advantages, such as they 
 were. The beneficed clergy had no difficulty in 
 finding assistance in their duties, and they were 
 never at a loss for companionship. Moreover, 
 licence of non-residence was very easily procured 
 by a parson who wished to spend a year or two at 
 the university. In many cases that licence was 
 renewed from year to year, and it was specially 
 common when a young man had been appointed to 
 a benefice early in his career. In such cases the 
 bishops occasionally insisted on his residing at 
 Cambridge or Oxford for a time. 
 
 (2) While he was away there were sure to be two 
 or three or sometimes half a dozen "chaplains" 
 or chantry priests, to whom the routine work of the 
 parish was entrusted. These men were carefully 
 watched by the churchwardens, and any irregularities 
 were promptly reported to the archdeacons, who did 
 not spare them. Of course there were many clerical 
 scamps who were a disgrace to their profession and 
 who drifted into the ranks of the loafers. There 
 are scamps in the medical profession, rogues in the 
 legal profession, blacklegs among the financiers, and 
 bankrupts among the most virtuous and upright 
 commercial classes. But where the competition 
 increases for every post and every place of prefer-
 
 Ii6 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 ment, there is at least an even chance that the best 
 men come to the fore, and we don't judge of a class 
 by taking the convicts and ticket-of-leave men as fair 
 specimens of tiie morale prevalent in the rank of life 
 to which those unfortunate persons respectively 
 belong at their start in life. 
 
 (3) The quiet, devout, and conscientious parson, 
 doing his duty day by day among his people, is the 
 last man who attains to notoriety. Unless a clergy- 
 man is bent on advertising himself, the less notorious 
 he is the better. Rogues do become notorious as 
 soon as they are found out and their names appear in 
 the police reports. The secular clergy before the 
 Reformation had a very sharp look-out kept upon 
 them, and when they tripped or went astray there 
 were only too many people who were on the watch 
 to expose them. Then they were heard of indeed. 
 It is clear from such books as John Myrc's 
 " Instructions for Parish Priests," printed by the 
 E.E.T.S., that there was a much higher standard of 
 feeling in a wide stratum of the people than some 
 would have us believe. Nor were the congregations 
 of the fourteenth century a whit less inclined to be 
 censorious than those of the nineteenth. When the 
 representatives of the parish of Colbroke were 
 questioned authoritatively by their bishop regarding 
 Sir William their vicar in the regular course of his
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 117 
 
 visitation in 1301, they said that he preached "well 
 enough " (siio uiodo), that, " as far as he knew " 
 {quantum novit), he expounded the Gospels to them, 
 but he did not teach them much {non uiultuui cos 
 infonnat). In fact he was a very harmless sort of a 
 humdrum man. There were lies told about him, 
 but they were lies. 
 
 Pretty much the same answers are given by the 
 chief men in the little town of Colyton. Sir Robert 
 Blund, the vicar, was a good man {probus homo) ; 
 he preached quajitum novit again, but not as much 
 as he ought in their opinion. His predecessor was 
 a man ; he had been wont to have classes for the 
 instruction of all the chaplains and clerks of the 
 Church. (Note that !) But this one was remiss in 
 this duty. Would the lord bishop be pleased to pull 
 him up ? {t>etunt quod covripiatur.) 
 
 Take them all in all, I cannot resist the impression, 
 which has become deeper and deeper upon me the 
 more I have read and pondered, that the parochial 
 clergy in England during the centuries between the 
 Conquest and the Reformation numbered amongst 
 them at all times some of the best men of their 
 generation. To begin with, they were always loyal 
 Englishmen. The same can at no time be said of
 
 iiS THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 (he monks, who from first to last were much less 
 true subjects of the King than at heart bigoted 
 adherents of the Pope of Rome. Chaucer's 
 manner of speaking of the poor parson of a 
 town reflects the feeling not only of his own 
 time, but really reflects the estimation in which 
 they were held at all times. Not once, not twice 
 in our history these parish priests are to be found 
 siding with the people against those in power, and 
 chosen by the people to be their spokesmen when 
 their grievances were becoming unbearable. When 
 that great awakening came which in the good 
 Providence of God the friars were permitted to 
 stir, and a new life, and a new enthusiasm, and a 
 new hunger and thirst after holiness thrilled through 
 the throbbing heart of the nation, the response 
 came first from the working clergy, who joined the 
 new Reformers wherever they appeared — not with- 
 out some grumbling that the new men absorbed 
 large sums, in the shape of burial and marriage 
 fees, from the poor parish priests, who could ill 
 afford to lose them. To the last the wills of the 
 clergy were full of legacies to the preaching friars. 
 When, again, a new awakening came, and the 
 Lollards went about as they did protesting against 
 errors which were real errors, though in the way of 
 doing it there was all the usual violence and
 
 BEFORE THE REFORMATION 119 
 
 exaggeration of men stirred by a fiery earnestness 
 — again they were the clergy, the working parish 
 priests, who gave that movement its impetus ; and 
 among the parish priests there were those who did 
 not shrink then from giving their bodies to be 
 burned, and who showed noble instances of 
 suffering for conscience' sake. So, too, when 
 Wycliffe was dreaming of a great religious revolu- 
 tion — hoping, in fact, for the Millennium which is 
 so long in coming — they were the poor priests of 
 townlet and village to whom he appealed for 
 sympathy and support, and he did not appeal in 
 vain. 
 
 It always has been so. The men that move the 
 world and keep it moving ; the men that carry the 
 truths of the Gospel to the hearts and consciences 
 of a nation — and more than that, bring those truths 
 into a nation's hearths and homes — are not the 
 monks in the cloister, so anxious about their own 
 precious souls that they hide themselves from their 
 fellow-sinners till they become the victims of that 
 pride which apes humility. More and more it is 
 becoming evident that the men who are to act upon 
 the masses must be in personal touch with the 
 masses — the working clergy in hamlet and village 
 and town. 
 
 It may be true that the parish priests rarely have
 
 i-o THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND 
 
 been the intellectual leaders of their generation or 
 the pioneers of science, discovery, or curious 
 learning, though there have been times when their 
 names, even in these matters, have not been 
 unknown. It may, again, be true that for the trained 
 academic intellects and the great scholars who are 
 such by profession and who lead the van of the 
 army of intellectual progress, such are not to be 
 sought in the humble villages, where, perhaps, 
 students are few. No ! You must look for them 
 here — here, where their home is ; here, where you 
 have come to listen to them and be taught by them. 
 The gifted and the privileged few are not to be 
 found in the lonely parsonage or the clergy house, 
 where the ceaseless toilers among the submerged 
 tenth and the dreadful residuum are knocking and 
 pressing at their doors. Yet it must be calamitous, 
 at any time, for the Church and the nation, if the 
 leaders of the blind are growing blinder than the 
 led, and if they who are groping and crying out so 
 piteously for the light should find fewer and fewer 
 of their appointed teachers qualified to show them 
 where such light is to be found.
 
 ROBBING GOD
 
 ''ROBBING GOD'' 
 I 
 
 IT must have pained many a loyal Churchman 
 during the past month to read some of the 
 speeches dehvered at meetings held up and down 
 the country to protest against the Welsh Suspensory 
 Bill. I For myself, I should look upon the passing 
 of such a measure with grief and dismay, for more 
 reasons than I care to set down here. But even 
 were I prepared to admit that the alienation of any 
 portion of the revenues of the Church in Wales and 
 the diverting them into any other channel would be 
 an unmixed evil, or were I even convinced that any 
 measure having such an object in view would be 
 necessarily impolitic or actually dishonest, I should 
 still feel called upon to protest against some argu- 
 ments that have been resorted to by too many of 
 
 ' June, 1893. 
 
 »23
 
 124 ''ROBBING COD'' 
 
 the fervid orators who have denounced the Bill, and 
 to put in an earnest caveat against the assumptions 
 made by speakers whose position and learning and 
 unsellish zeal deserve the respect of us all. 
 
 If it were a mere question of bowing to the 
 authority of our ecclesiastical superiors, and the 
 duty of remaining silent when a powerful consensus 
 of opinion has found a voice which speaks with 
 authority, it would be presumption on the part of 
 any clergyman in my position to ask for a hearing ; 
 but the interests at stake are so very grave that I 
 feel impelled to take part in the discussion that is 
 going on, though I do so with the utmost reluc- 
 tance and sorely against the grain. I do so now 
 because I am convinced that it is of supreme 
 importance, not only to the Church and Church- 
 men, but to the nation at large, that at this crisis 
 the army of defence and the army of attack should 
 if possible be warned against taking up positions 
 which are untenable, and so engaging in the con- 
 flict without due consideration of the issues that 
 are really involved. 
 
 Again and again it has been said, and continues 
 to be said, that the spoliation of the endowments of 
 the Established Church and their redistribution 
 would be robbing God. The expression is one which 
 I cannot but think wholly indefensible, look at the
 
 ''ROBBING GOD'' 125 
 
 matter in what way we may. Of course I know as 
 well as most men do, that when in the eleventh and 
 twelfth centuries a great or small landowner was 
 moved to surrender a portion of his estates to what is 
 called " pious uses," the deed of gift was worded in 
 the form that X or Y " gave io God and the Church 
 or the abbey of Z" this or that tract of land, or other 
 endowment. I know that such transfer was, after 
 the Conquest, almost invariably made by men or 
 women during their lifetime, and was not the gift 
 of the dead hand, as it is so frequently but erro- 
 neously represented to have been. But I know, 
 too, that this expression "giving to God" meant 
 primarily that the donors had performed an act 
 of surrender and sacrifice whereby they deprived 
 themselves of the enjoyment of this or that source 
 of wealth that God might be glorified, and that 
 others might derive benefit by the usufruct of such 
 property as the good men or women had stript 
 themselves of from more or less high and conscien- 
 tious motives. When, as was often the case, forms 
 of malediction were added upon all who should at 
 any future time alienate or diminish the "free 
 alms," this addition goes far to show that even in 
 the " ages of faith " the gift io God was not always 
 regarded as inviolable. Indeed, as time went on 
 much of the property which had been regarded as 
 essentially inalienable got into strange hands.
 
 126 ''ROBBING GOD'' 
 
 But the question has been raised and debated, 
 sometimes from the moral, sometimes from the 
 pohtical point of view, as to wliether a gift of this 
 kind was not in its essence a usurpation on the 
 giver's part ; whether, in fact, he was not convey- 
 ing more than he had the power to bestow, and 
 claiming rights over his property which are not 
 inherent in ownership. 
 
 Looked at from the standpoint of the constitu- 
 tional historian, it may be said that such gifts of 
 lands as we are considering could not be made 
 without the license of the Crown in the first 
 instance, nor without the confirmation of the heirs 
 even for generations after the death of the original 
 donor. That is to say, that every such surrender 
 of ownership, as it is the fashion to call a " gift to 
 God," was a gift which could only be made with 
 the sanction of the State — a sanction which in those 
 ages necessarily took the form of a license from the 
 sovereign, and was a gift requiring the consent of 
 the heirs whose prospective interest was barred by 
 the act of the tenant for life ; the theory being that 
 without such confirmation the land might revert to 
 the heirs. 
 
 Moreover, when these grants took effect the 
 property conveyed was in all cases to be enjoyed 
 subject to certain conditions binding upon the
 
 ''ROBBING GOD" 127 
 
 beneficiaries ; the enormous assumption being that 
 the ownership of property carried with it a right to 
 dictate to all posterity what use such property 
 should be turned to. 
 
 At the time of the Conquest the income derived 
 from tithes and glebe lands in England was devoted 
 to the support of the Ecclesiastical Order. The 
 Secular clergy, as they were called, had compara- 
 tively few obligations, and those may be fairly 
 summed up by saying that the clergy were expected 
 to live among the lay folk to discharge certain 
 pastoral, ministerial, and priestly functio»ns, and 
 probably to some extent to serve as the educators of 
 the people. The allocation of tithes for the enrich- 
 ment of the monasteries, if not quite unknown, had 
 certainly been but rarely allowed and seldom 
 attempted. 
 
 With the Conquest the alienation of strictly 
 ecclesiastical endowments began and went on 
 rapidly. The justification of such alienation was 
 based upon two assumptions : — 
 
 (i) The first was, that such endowments as had 
 been granted to the Church, and the reservation of 
 which had been sanctioned by the State, were 
 intended to secure for the nation not only all that 
 the Seculars (that is, the parish priests) were doing 
 or professed to be doing for their people, but some-
 
 128 "ROBBING GOD" 
 
 tiling more, something much more, which the 
 Seculars were not doing and were not qualified 
 to do. 
 
 (2) The second assumption was, that wherever it 
 became apparent that the needs of the nation, the 
 spiritual or the educational needs, could not be 
 adequately supplied by the old functionaries — while 
 a new order of volunteers had arisen who claimed 
 to be able to supply the new needs — then it was 
 allowable, in foro conscieiiticv, to divert endowments 
 held under conditions supposed to be adequate 
 formerly, and to allocate them for the maintenance 
 of the new functionaries. 
 
 Such alienation was carried out accordingly, that 
 so the requirements of a wider culture, a deeper 
 sense of moral and spiritual responsibility, and a 
 steady advance in our civilisation (using that word 
 in its widest sense) might be to some extent pro- 
 vided for and their stability be secured, by at least 
 a gnDit in aid, from the reserve of ecclesiastical 
 property. 
 
 Thus when the rage for the cloister life was 
 running its course and monasteries were springing 
 up in every shire it was loudly proclaimed that 
 these institutions were the only possible abodes of 
 holiness. It was said and believed that only among 
 " the religious " — i.e., the men and women who
 
 "ROBBING GOD'' 129 
 
 vvxre subject to a rule of discipline, framed so as to 
 minimise worldliness and to train the Regulars in 
 the ways of godliness — could the conscience, the 
 sentiment of aspiration, and the habits of devotion 
 and self-surrender be quickened, stimulated, and 
 lifted to a higher plane than the parish priests had 
 been aiming at. 
 
 It began to be believed that the nation needed to 
 be taught "the ways of holiness;" and in proportion 
 as this conviction gained ground, in that proportion 
 did fresh endowments pour in for the enrichment 
 of the new order. The monks and nuns — rightly 
 or wrongly — got to be looked upon as a supplemen- 
 tary force who were doing that which the parish 
 priests could not do ; and it was hardly a step 
 further to claim for the newly organised volunteers 
 a share of the ancient revenues which, it was almost 
 broadly asserted, were not doing for the nation all 
 that might be done with them in the interest of the 
 community at large. 
 
 But these alienations of Church properly did not 
 stop at this point. It would be difficult to say how 
 soon and when first the clergy began to claim 
 immunity from taxation ; but among us at the time 
 of the Conquest they certainly were called upon to 
 contribute towards the defence of the realm, and 
 the episcopal lands especially were held under con- 
 
 10
 
 130 "ROBBING GOD'' 
 
 dition of providing contingents of armed retainers 
 who should support the King in his wars. Scarcely 
 fifty years after the Conqueror's death the crusading 
 mania had passed like a conflagration over the 
 Continent of Europe. In process of time it 
 reached us, with what results most people know. 
 A belief prevailed extensively that battle with the 
 infidels was the highest act of piety and self- 
 sacrifice, and, as the child of that mischievous 
 delusion, there grew up the strange institution of 
 ecclesiastical orders of knighthood, among whom 
 the order of the Knights Templars became the most 
 renowned. 
 
 The Templars were looked upon as the champions 
 of Christendom, the keepers of the Holy Sepulchre, 
 the army of occupation in the Holy Land. Of 
 course they were laymen, and their occupation was 
 war. But the war was a holy war, forsooth ; they 
 were emphatically fighters for God. As such they 
 too put forth their claim to participate in the income 
 derivable from the Ecclesiastical Reserve, and the 
 claim was very soon allowed. The consciences of 
 the more enlightened may have been shocked, the 
 voices of some may have been lifted up with 
 indignation against the impudent fraud, but the 
 twelfth century was not half over before the wealth 
 of the Templars had become the occasion of scandal
 
 "ROBBING GOD" 131 
 
 and offence, and the more so because chitirhes, 
 benefices, and tithes had been extensively ahenated 
 in their favour ; the excuse for such ahenation, and 
 its justification in Church law, being that the 
 Templars were fighting God's battles and so were 
 doing for the Church what the clergy could not do 
 for themselves. 
 
 Another century went by and a new movement 
 began. Originating in the religious upheaval which 
 the enthusiasm of the mendicant orders gave rise to, 
 it speedily took the form of an intellectual awaken- 
 ing. As educationists the Secular clergy had been 
 found wanting : they had not been efficient as the 
 teachers of the people. To some small extent the 
 monks had taken over the work of their rivals in 
 this respect. Perhaps it may be said that the 
 Regulars had posed as " men of light and leading." 
 Yet after a trial of some two or three centuries the 
 monks too had fallen very far behind their ideal. 
 As the homes for the studious, as nurseries for 
 scholars pursuing their researches, as schools for 
 the rising generation, the religious houses too had 
 proved a failure. 
 
 The few splendid exceptions only proved the rule 
 that the monasteries were doing less than was 
 expected of them in the way of raising the standard 
 of morals, devotion, and, least of all, of learning.
 
 132 "ROBBING GOD'' 
 
 It was found thai young Englishmen of exceptional 
 gifts and ambitions were seeking at Paris, at Padua, 
 at Bologna or Palermo, that education in law, 
 medicine, or theology which they could not find 
 at home. Thoughtful and patriotic students and 
 scholars set themselves to supply the want of a 
 higher culture in England, which was making itself 
 felt unmistakably. Walter de Merton led the way, 
 and Merton College was founded. His example 
 was quickly followed, and Cambridge and Oxford 
 became the real homes of learning among us before 
 the fourteenth century was half over. But so far 
 from the new colleges being narrowly ecclesiastical 
 in the studies they promoted, so far from their being 
 theological seminaries as we understand that desig- 
 nation now, so far from being religious houses — 
 that is, monastic in tlicir clKirr.clei- — it is certain 
 that from two at least of them monks and friars 
 were expressly excluded, and one of the new colleges 
 was founded for students of the Civil and Canon 
 Law, and for such alone. 
 
 The founders of these colleges were pre-eminently 
 educational reformers. They came forward nobly 
 to head the party of progress in this direction, and 
 they, in their generosity, made large sacrifices of 
 their substance to further the great ends they had 
 in view — sacrifices which the nation sanctioned by 
 silencing the alienation of lands for the endowments.
 
 ''ROBBING GOD'' 133 
 
 But this was not all. Once more the tithes of 
 country parishes, glebe lands, and parsonages were 
 diverted and made over to the new foundations ; 
 the common sense of the community tacitly express- 
 ing its conviction that it was for the advantage of 
 the people at large — yes 1 and for the advantage of 
 the Church of God too — that the standard of educa- 
 tion should be raised, and that (inasmuch as the 
 great reserve had been handed down to promote 
 the spiritual, moral, and intellectual well-being of 
 the nation) it was legitimate to subsidise, from the 
 common stock, any of those bringers-in of new 
 things whose lives were devoted to the furtherance 
 of any one of these ends. 
 
 All this is demonstrable from history. It is not 
 needful, it would be mere waste of time, to prove 
 the point with minute elaboration. To this hour 
 such of our colleges and schools as date back to 
 pre-Reformation days derive large portions of their 
 incomes from Church lands and tithes which for 
 ages had been devoted exclusively to the support 
 of the ministers of the sanctuary. The process has 
 always been going on. Art; we now going to 
 denounce the principle which has guided our course 
 for well-nigh a thousand years as sacrilege ? Can 
 we seriously pretend that all these successive diver- 
 sions of Church property deserved to be stigmatised 
 as robbery ?
 
 II 
 
 THE generation of Englishmen whose happiness 
 it was in their youth to be brought under 
 the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is passing 
 away. The number of those who actually knew 
 him, saw him, heard him, and were subjected to 
 the sway of his attractive personality is now very 
 small. He died when I was a child ; but I had 
 hardly grown up to manhood before I had been 
 taught to reverence his name, to give myself to 
 an enthusiastic study of his writings, and to accept 
 his teaching as the teaching of one whom it was 
 almost always safe and wise to follow as a guide. 
 No man who watches the currents of thought 
 that are setting in this direction or in that, and 
 which are the resultants of forces brought into 
 action by the onward march of discovery and the 
 progress of science, can hold exactly to the views 
 which sufficed for him in his younger days ; for 
 
 »34
 
 "ROBBING GOD" 135 
 
 bigotry in his political or philosophic creed can 
 only be the intellectual vice of him whose mind 
 does not grow. 
 
 Nevertheless, for myself, I still hold that Coleridge 
 was one of the profound thinkers of his time, and 
 almost the most philosophic Conservative that this 
 country has ever produced. My conviction is still 
 strong that his tractate, " On the Constitution of the 
 Church and State according to the Idea of Each," is 
 one of those monumental works which no thought- 
 ful man among us ought to leave unread — and, I 
 may add, unstudied. 
 
 If the book were always attractive in its every 
 page ; if it did not contain many curious and 
 characteristic weaknesses — sometimes irritating, 
 sometimes saddening ; if it did not occasionally 
 put a certain strain upon a disciple's loyalty, it 
 would not be Coleridge's. But accept it for what 
 it is and what it professes to be — not a scholastic 
 treatise, but something more if also something less 
 — and the propositions enunciated seem to me 
 irrefragable, the conclusions arrived at unanswer- 
 able. 
 
 The two fundamental positions laid down b^ 
 Coleridge are concerned, the one with the true 
 idea of the National Church, the other with the 
 idea of what I have called the reserve /unci of that
 
 136 "ROBBING GOD" 
 
 National Chinch, and which Coleridge calls the 
 Nationally. 
 
 Of the lirst he says : " The Clcrisy of the nation, 
 or National Church, in its primary acceptation and 
 original intention, comprehended the learned of all 
 denominations, the sages and professors of the law 
 and jurisprudence, of medicine and physiology, of 
 music, of military and civil architecture, of the 
 physical sciences, with the mathematical as the 
 common organ of the preceding ; in short, all the 
 so-called liberal arts and sciences, the possession 
 and application of which constitute the civilisation 
 of a country, as well as the theological." 
 
 (2) Of the second — that is, the Nationalty, or what 
 in common parlance we are wont to call Church 
 property — he says as distinctly and emphatically as 
 before : " I do not assert that the proceeds from the 
 Nationalty cannot be rightfully vested except in 
 what we now mean by clergymen and the estab- 
 lished clergy. / have everywhere implied the contrary, 
 ... Had every rood, every peppercorn, every 
 stone, brick, and beam been retransferred and made 
 heritable at the * Reformation,' no right would have 
 been invaded, no principle of justice violated. 
 What the State by law — that is, by the collective 
 will of its functionaries at any one time assembled — 
 can do or suffer to he done, that the State by law can 
 undo or inhibits
 
 "ROBBING GOD" 137 
 
 Let it be noted that these are the words of a 
 thinker who has again and again been called the 
 Tory Philosophey — whose name for more than seventy 
 years has been a name to conjure by among those 
 who consider themselves and claim to be considered 
 the only true Conservatives — the thinker whom not 
 a few Progressionists (because they have never read 
 his writings) have superciliously derided as a dreamer 
 of whom the best that could be said was that his 
 writings were harmless and his theories consigned 
 to oblivion. 
 
 Yet Coleridge's " Church and State " has worked 
 as such leaven always does work, and it would be 
 very hard to say how much its pregnant hints and 
 suggestions have affected the legislation of the last 
 sixty years. 
 
 Five years after the book appeared a commission 
 of inquiry into the state of the Church of England 
 was issued, and in 1836 the Ecclesiastical Commis- 
 sioners became a Corporation with perpetual succes- 
 sion and a common seal. It was the beginning of 
 a new era. Since then we have dealt with ecclesias- 
 tical property — the Nationally — on the assumption 
 that it constitutes a fund which the Legislature had 
 not only the right to administer for the well-being 
 of the people, but that it was the duty of the nation 
 too to guard against its being in any way wastefully
 
 138 ''ROBBING GOD" 
 
 administered. The episcopal and capitular estates 
 have been taken out of the control of those bodies, 
 and readjustment of the revenues has been carried 
 out with a high hand. Restrictions have been 
 imposed upon the granting of leases by the tenants 
 for life. Benefices have been divided or consoli- 
 dated with small regard to the real or supposed 
 rights of patrons. We have recognised that the 
 Kationalty might legitimately be treated as a fund 
 not necessarily limited in its application to the 
 maintenance of clerks in Holy Orders. We have 
 materially altered the constitution of our older 
 Universities ; we have imposed new statutes upon the 
 older colleges ; we have very seriously diminished 
 their available incomes ; we have changed the 
 tenure by which Fellowships were held ; we have 
 almost abolished their ecclesiastical character ; we 
 have dealt in the same way with our endowed 
 schools, and at this moment the headmasters of 
 some of the most important among them are lay- 
 men. What results have followed upon these 
 changes ? 
 
 Fifty years ago there were twenty-four professors 
 in the University of Cambridge, of whom five only 
 were laymen. There are now forty professors, of 
 whom, excluding the professors of Divinity, only 
 three are in Holy Orders ] while at Oxford, of the
 
 "ROBBING GOD" 139 
 
 forty-eight professors, excluding the professors of 
 Divinity, again only three are clergymen. If it 
 were worth while to compare the numbers of lay 
 and "clerical" Fellows of Colleges respectively as 
 they stood in 1843 and as they stand at present, the 
 change that has come over the Universities in half 
 a century would be even more striking. 
 
 The change may be, and is to many, a matter to 
 be mourned over ; it may have, and it has, occa- 
 sioned melancholy and lugubrious vaticinations ; it 
 may or may not augur ill for the future ; but the 
 facts are not to be gainsaid. Nor can we shut our 
 eyes to another fact — deplorable or not according to 
 our several points of view — a fact to which attention 
 has not been drawn with that serious insistence 
 which its significance might well justify — a fact, too, 
 which it is hardly conceivable should not affect our 
 legislation in the future, because it is the outcome of 
 our legislation in the past. * 
 
 The leaders in thought and culture, in mathe- 
 matical and physical science, in history, economics, 
 linguistics, even in classical learning — the leaders in 
 literature in its widest acceptation — are no longer 
 to be found among the ordained clergy of the 
 Church of England, but outside their ranks. One 
 fact alone may serve as a most startling confirma- 
 tion of these assertions. In 1843 there were ninety
 
 I40 "ROBBING GOD'' 
 
 Fellows of the Royal Society who were in Holy 
 Orders. In 1893 the names of no more than sixteen 
 clergymen of the Established Church are to be 
 found in the roll-call of England's most illustrious 
 brotherhood. It is worse than idle to shut our eyes 
 to all this — the logic of facts is irresistible. 
 
 Meanwhile it is no more than their due to protest 
 for the clergy of the Established Church that, as a 
 body, they were never doing their pastoral work 
 better than they are doing it now ; never were they 
 less worldly and mercenary ; never were their lives 
 more exemplary ; never were they making greater 
 sacrifices ; never were they more earnestly devoted 
 to their sacred calling. Their very zeal and un- 
 wearied labours have taught the laity to expect ever 
 more and more at their hands. Yet with the 
 increasing claims that have been and are made 
 upon their services, the immense increase of the 
 population brings home to us the certainty that it 
 is no longer possible for the Anglican clergy to 
 discharge all those duties — the spiritual and the 
 religious duties — which it is of supreme importance, 
 in the highest interest of the community, should not 
 be neglected. It is not conceivable that we should 
 stop at the point we have reached. 
 
 Doubtless, in the old days, the parish priests pro- 
 tested against the alienation of their incomes for
 
 ''ROBBING GOD'' 141 
 
 subsidising the monastic orders. They were not 
 hkely "to take joyfully the spoiling of their goods" 
 when the great educational movement set in, and 
 the founders of schools and colleges levied large 
 contributions from the Natioualty, and to that 
 extent impoverished the parish priests. But in each 
 case the new impropriators proved to be powerful 
 auxiliaries, stimulating the Seculars, elevating their 
 tone, and provoking them to jealousy. In any case, 
 the question was far less whether the alienation of 
 the old endowments and the diversion of them into 
 a new channel of usefulness was defensible, than 
 whether there was not some danger of this being 
 carried too far in favour of the new order. 
 
 What, then, is the attitude which it behoves us all 
 to adopt w'hen a senseless and ignorant cry has been 
 raised for the disestablishment and disendowment 
 of the Church of England ? Surely our first 
 business is to press for an answer to the question. 
 What do these men mean who take it as their 
 shibboleth ? 
 
 If they mean nothing more and nothing less than 
 indiscriminate pillage, ending in a scramble for the 
 spoils ; if they mean stripping the clergy of their 
 incomes, driving them out from their homes, and 
 leaving the poor of the land lo find religious 
 teachers and pastors for themselves — then their
 
 142 "ROBBING GOD'' 
 
 object is to bring about an incomparable national 
 calamity. The inevitable consequence of such a 
 catastrophe would be that in the domain of morals 
 and religious sentiment, when our nobler emotions 
 and spiritual aspirations and gentler sympathies are 
 appealed to, there the forces of disintegration would 
 have their full play, unchecked, uncontrolled — chaos 
 would come again. But that cry may be changed 
 for a better cry ; it may, in God's providence, be 
 taught to take another form, and it may then express 
 the conviction of the people that the time has come 
 for making a step, not backwards into darkness and 
 religious anarchy, but forwards upon the road of 
 intelligent reform. Whatever it may mean, it is the 
 utmost madness and stupidity to attempt to raise 
 against it a louder but scarcely less misleading and 
 mischievous cry, because one which is in its essence 
 an assiunptio falsi. 
 
 Base the title of the Established Church to her 
 endowments upon considerations of the highest 
 political expediency, and you choose ground from 
 which it will be dil^cult to be dislodged. Appeal 
 to the gratitude of our countrymen, and teach them 
 what the Anglican clergy have been and have done 
 for their ancestors and their fatherland in the past, 
 and you will not appeal in vain. Nay, appeal to the 
 hopes and fears of the future if you will, and, rightly
 
 "ROBBING GOD" 143 
 
 instructed, the nation will no longer surrender 
 themselves to those who would " make a desert and 
 call it peace." But beware how you rashly and 
 stubbornly insist that the formulae, the ritual, the 
 discipline, the general regimen of the Church as by 
 law established, are each and all equally and in- 
 dubitably of Divine origin, and that to alienate one 
 jot or tittle of her property is to "rob GOD " !
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 II
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 I AM continually worried by a kind ot dream 
 which disturbs my peace of mind by day and 
 by night, and which yet I cannot bring myself to 
 believe is anything more than an ignorant and 
 foolish dream, deluding me into the acceptance of 
 half a truth as though that were as true as the whole. 
 Call my dream a delusion if you will, but this is 
 what it says to me with a cruel insistence. 
 
 There is, says the voice in my dream, a great and 
 dreadful law working through all the Universe and 
 operating in the direction of glorifying mere bigness 
 at the expense of littleness, so that the little is for 
 ever being absorbed and consumed, even annihi- 
 lated by the huge. Moreover, this law prevails "in 
 morals as well as mechanics," so to speak, insomuch 
 that there are large souls that will swallow up small 
 souls in the lapse of ages. And there are great 
 personalities that represent a conglomerate of little 
 
 M7
 
 148 THE CRY OB THE VILLAGES 
 
 personalities devouring the feebler individuals who 
 will be taken up and turned to better account when 
 they cease to be separate existences at all. 
 
 My transcendental friends assure me that the 
 Material Universe — that is the immense aggregate 
 of worlds which are made of matter — so far from 
 being infinite is demonstrably not infinite ; on the 
 contrary, that it is probably only one of many 
 Universes, held in solution by the much more 
 widely diffused something which is called Ether ; 
 and that there was a time when Matter existed as a 
 vast chaos whose constituent atoms were floating in 
 this all-embracing Ether ; each separate atom self- 
 asserting and yet acting upon and being acted upon 
 by the rest. Then the aforesaid atoms proceeded to 
 combine and cohere into molecules ; the molecules 
 tended to grow into masses, and the masses could 
 not but associate into worlds. Thus, too, worlds 
 were evolved into systems with central suns round 
 which they moved in their orbits, while the suns sup- 
 ported themselves by feeding upon the vagrant 
 refuse meteors, and occasionally devouring as their 
 prey some unhappy little worldling which per- 
 adventure had been rejoicing in its prosperous 
 independence. Thus the big from the beginning of 
 time has always swallowed up the little, and so it 
 will go on for ever and ever.
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 149 
 
 Yes ! And observe, moreover, what an object 
 lesson this httle proud planet of ours affords to all 
 beholders 1 There were aeons during which the 
 living creatures upon its surface ran to Bigness. 
 Monstrous saurians — mastodons — what not, here in 
 our northern latitudes ; while down there on the 
 distant Australian continent there grew up grim 
 marsupial lions, voiceless, well-nigh brainless, but 
 enormous, devouring gluttonously the lesser 
 creatures, good only for filling the maws of their 
 bigger brethren. Down in New Zealand there — 
 think of the tremendous birds — Dinornis, Moas, 
 what not ? — stalking even the terrified mannikins 
 that doubtless they put into their crops by the dozen. 
 The same law — one is almost inclined to call it a 
 grotesque law. And yet — and yet — and yet — some- 
 how — another law came into force, correcting, 
 counteracting, supplementing, the former law, till 
 lo 1 Bigness had to give way to something better. 
 But about that other law this worrying dream of 
 mine has told me nothing. Only sometimes my 
 mind — in revolt against the tyranny of a lopsided 
 theory — insists on asking itself. Who knows, while 
 all this tyranny of the Big was going on — who 
 knows, I say, how many worlds may have exploded 
 into their initial molecules, or died off as our little 
 moon did, starved, in fact, by mere cold ?
 
 ISO rilE CRY or THE VILLAGES 
 
 "Work it out into your next month's article, Mr* 
 Gigadibs ! " as Bishop Blougram says. 
 
 No better ilhistration of the operation of this law 
 that I speak of can be found than in the way in 
 which money tends to increase in downright bulk — 
 huge, unwieldy, portentous — till in our days the 
 millionaires are not only becoming every year more 
 numerous, but the colossal fortunes in the hands of 
 private persons are assuming proportions which 
 baffle our imaginations when we try to understand 
 what they mean ! Think of the stupendous accu- 
 mulations of X. and Y. and Z. in England and 
 America ! Think of the late Baron Hirsch and his 
 excellent lady having died only the other day, 
 possessed, between them, of upwards of twenty- 
 four millions sterling ! Think of the absolute 
 impossibility of any citizen of any nation upon 
 earth being able to spend year after year the 
 income of such a gigantic capital on any legiti- 
 mate objects ! What is to be the end of it ? 
 What is to come of it ? This seems at any rate 
 inevitable, namely, that the value of mere money 
 must go on decreasing, and probably that such 
 decrease, when once it begins, must go on by leaps 
 and bounds. Already we observe that some of
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 151 
 
 those precious objects which we call kixuries are 
 fetching ever higher and higher prices. And yet, en 
 revanche, the necessaries of hfe are getting cheaper 
 and cheaper. Not only so, but there is one com- 
 modity which, in the lifetime of men not yet old, used 
 to be regarded as the]most certain and stable and im- 
 movable source of wealth — I mean the agricultural 
 land of this country — has, during the last twenty 
 years or so, immensely deteriorated in value, and is 
 actually tending to become less and less a safe or 
 desirable investment for capital. There are tens of 
 thousands of acres — say hundreds of thousands — 
 of land in England at this moment which may be 
 bought for a sixth of what they would have fetched 
 twenty years ago. Nor is this all. The tillers of the 
 soil who are employers of labour, after all that has 
 been done for them by successive Governments, 
 declare that it is well-nigh impossible to farm at a 
 profit by working their land after the fashion of their 
 fathers ; and the tillers of the soil who are the work- 
 ing peasantry in receipt of wages show an increasing 
 reluctance to remain "upon the land"; and that 
 though a very large number acknowledge in so 
 many words, and others are not careful to dispute 
 the fact, that unskilled labour in the towns is little 
 if at all more remunerative, and leaves little if at all 
 more margin of profit which may be laid by
 
 152 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 than the wages now earned by the agricultural 
 labourer. 
 
 We have no horrible slums in the villages. We have 
 no submerged tenth of vicious and degraded men 
 and women. We don't know what ragged children 
 and starving, shoeless families mean. Stop your 
 bicycles where you will at the door of any Norfolk 
 village school — you happy ones who roam over the 
 length and breadth of the land nowadays — go in 
 and look at the bright, clean, joyous, and well- 
 dressed children at their work, hear them sing, see 
 them drawing, notice them at their play, and listen 
 to their speech in anger or in joy. Why, the rising 
 generation of our village children have doubled the 
 vocabulary of their grandfathers, and the words that 
 have dropped out and are almost quite forgotten, so 
 far from being any loss, constitute a clear gain. 
 
 But when these children leave our schools they 
 are unsettled, dissatisfied ; they will not stay in the 
 old village homes. The girls find places in the 
 towns as domestic servants, and come back to us 
 for a few days' holiday with the manners of gentle- 
 ivotnen (not merely lyedies), and become eloquent 
 propagandists of the abominable doctrine that there 
 is nothing like life in the towns. Their brothers 
 believe them, and look out with keen eyes for em- 
 ployment upon the railway, in the police force, in
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 153 
 
 some town factory, anything except settling clown 
 upon the land. The farmers grumble, they tell you 
 that it all comes of this high-flying education, 
 they insist warmly and angrily that " you are 
 educating the labouring class above their station." 
 If you mean by " station " their ■present surroundings, 
 the farmers are right after all. But our educational 
 "forwards" are ready with iJieir remedy. "Give 
 them continuation classes," they cry ; " provide 
 night schools ! Teach them shorthand ! Try 
 lantern slides 1 " 
 
 You do try these interesting experiments — 
 especially the lantern slides — and yet it is plain 
 that the response is languid, very discouragingly 
 languid. The exodus from the villages goes on. 
 The young fellows tire of being lectured and taught 
 the methods of culture which you proclaim to be 
 sovereign remedies to stir and vitalise the vis 
 inerlicv of the bucolic mind. The County 
 Councils are at their wits' ends to know what to 
 do with the money at their disposal. There are 
 whole districts which are tending to fall out of 
 cultivation, and tending, too, to become mere 
 deserts like the Campagna, or like the morne and 
 melancholy wilderness where the great temples of 
 Paestum stand staring at the sea in their sullen lone- 
 liness, sorrowing — if ruins ever do sorrow — for the
 
 154 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 good old times. For there were times when 
 myriads of worshippers thronged into those stately 
 fanes, and all the air was full of sweetest perfume 
 travelling on and on from those famous rose 
 gardens which supplied Baiae and Pompeii and 
 Naples with "table decorations" for the countless 
 banquets, and were even hurried off to Rome itself 
 when the south wind blew strong enough to fill the 
 lateen sail, and the light barge laden with blossoms 
 scudded before the breeze, making for Ostia and the 
 Tiber. 
 
 Alas ! for the dreary wastes now ! Alas ! for the 
 deadly desolation I What brought it all about, that 
 this land of flowers and fruit and busy life should 
 have become derelict ? " Oh ! It was the malaria, of 
 course ! Men could not live in that pestilential air. 
 Don't you know ? " 
 
 No, I don't know ! I know just the contrary. 
 Men did not run away from the malaria. The 
 malaria came when men had run away from the 
 land. It is the mission of man to make the wilder- 
 ness and the solitary place glad, and to make the 
 desert rejoice ; and he has done it, and is doing it 
 for ever, consciously or unconsciously, since the 
 beginning of time. Again and again the children of 
 men have reclaimed the barren wastes, reclaimed 
 them, settled upon them, subdued and mastered the
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 155 
 
 rebel swamps and jungles ; bade the crawling 
 poisonous vapours — Pass ! And they did pass, till 
 by and by the fever-haunted soil became like the 
 Paradise of Eden, and a happy people gave thanks 
 to the gods after their fashion, and set up their 
 altars, and round about them youths and maidens 
 trooped in long procession, marching in pomp of 
 exultant festival "to the beds of spices, to feed in 
 the gardens, and to gather the lilies." 
 
 To think of this dear land of ours, that was once 
 called Merry England, becoming spotted about with 
 huge cankerous ulcers of pampas or prairie — with 
 never a sound of a human voice to stir the echoes, 
 and never a happy human face to make the sunshine 
 glad in heaven — is a thought that turns my heart 
 sick with terror. I do not want to see our father- 
 land what she was — that, and only that. No putting 
 back the clock for me. Nor should I be content 
 to leave her as she is, and calmly speak of her as if 
 she were no other than a faded beauty past her 
 prime, and suffering from incipient decay. Oh, 
 shameful ! that we should acquiesce in that reproach 
 upon ourselves, when nothing more is needed than 
 for the sons and daughters whom she reared and 
 fosters to be loyal to their mother. 
 
 • act* 
 
 At this stage it may be worth our while to inquire
 
 15^ THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 whether there may not be after all some sense in 
 that not infrequent saying of our farmers that " the 
 labourers' children are being educated above their 
 station." For let it be said, as has often been said 
 before, though it needs repeating, that the employers 
 of labour in our country villages are not invariably 
 fools — not even when they may happen to have no 
 more than ten or twelve thousand pounds or so 
 of capital embarked in the tillage of the soil. Of 
 course the poor clodhoppers cannot be, and do not 
 pretend to be, as omniscient as you wiseacres of the 
 streets. You know everything. The incapables of 
 the broad-acres at best know only one thing — 
 namely, their own business — and this one thing 
 must obviously be included in your everything. 
 Nevertheless, you might stretch a point, and give 
 them the credit of knowing just a little about their 
 peculiar one. 
 
 " I pity his ignorance and despise him," said Miss 
 Squeers. Could she not have got on without the 
 contempt, and yet afforded the pity ? 
 
 . 
 
 To any thoughtful student of our social history 
 during the last thirty years, few facts are more 
 worthy of notice than the wholly different way in 
 which our elementary schools are regarded by the 
 dwellers in the town and country respectively. In
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 157 
 
 our country villages the school is the be-all and 
 the end-all of human culture. The child who has 
 passed his standards is reckoned a perfectly educated 
 boy or girl, and it must be added that, as a rule, 
 among our elementary teachers themselves there are 
 few who care to dissipate this delusion. In the 
 town, on the other hand, the elementary school is 
 looked upon as the mere beginning and starting 
 point from which all noble endeavours to raise the 
 intellectual level of the masses must proceed. That 
 the children must be taught, and taught as well as 
 may be, has been assumed as a necessity ; but 
 that having been taught a minimum of elementary 
 knowledge they should be left to take their chance 
 and run wild for the rest of their lives is not to be 
 heard of. Some of them — perhaps many of them — 
 came from vicious homes, and live in squalid dens 
 and cellars. Then the Augean stables must be 
 cleansed, and the slums must be got rid of if 
 possible, in the interest of the children that are 
 and of those that are to be. So you set yourselves 
 to improve your toilers' dwellings, and you erect 
 sanitary dwellings for the poor, and you issue your 
 appeals to the rich for this good cause and that. 
 The more you ask the more you get, till ungrudging 
 benevolence seems actually tending to overtake the 
 needs of your crowded millions.
 
 I^ THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 But pari passu with the magnificent activity 
 shown in providing suitable dwelHngs for the 
 workers, others are showing as great and noble 
 a zeal in their endeavours to make the lives of 
 their poor brethren more joyous, more interesting, 
 more rational, more human. You lay out parks 
 and recreation grounds, build museums and art 
 galleries, libraries, and lecture halls. You make 
 vice difficult, and amusement refining. There is 
 nothing in the whole world that can compare 
 with the exhibitions which are open to the poorest 
 in London, and no better music than that which a 
 poor fellow out of work may listen to at his leisure 
 when the bands play. 
 
 Nor is it only in the great capital of the Empire 
 that all this wealth in the means of innocent enjoy- 
 ment is provided for the million. Birmingham and 
 Liverpool and Manchester and Sheffield, and many 
 another of our large cities, vie with one another in 
 the conspicuous examples they afford of that mag- 
 nanimous foresight which is always on the look-out 
 for new channels of beneficence. For let it be 
 remembered that only a small part of all this 
 money spent in advancing the happiness and 
 well-being of the wage-earners has been paid for 
 out of Imperial or local taxation. 
 
 Even granting that the great bulk of the cost of
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 159 
 
 building and keeping up our schools has come out 
 of rates and taxes, our hospitals in the main are 
 supported by voluntary contributions, and churches 
 " of all denominations " are being built with more 
 or less splendour every year by private munificence. 
 Even colleges and universities are founded and 
 endowed by the grand liberality of rich men here 
 and there and everywhere. What can be more 
 splendid than the starting up of the University of 
 Liverpool, as if by magic, during the too short 
 career of its first accomplished principal, at whose 
 suggestion a dozen or more Liverpool merchants 
 have provided for the maintenance in perpetuity of 
 as many professorial chairs ? Even this glorious 
 generosity seems not unlikely to be surpassed by 
 the men of Birmingham, who have resolved to have 
 another university of their own. But, indeed, the 
 wonderful work done, and the sacrifices made by the 
 citizens of Birmingham in the interest of the working 
 classes, are almost bewildering when one comes to 
 count up the vast sums that have been expended in 
 a city which as yet only takes the sixth place in the 
 Empire, and whose population hardly amounts to a 
 ninth of the enormous aggregate of London. ^ 
 
 • See a remarkable article in the May number of the 
 Cenltiry Magazine, by an American gentleman, Mr. George 
 F. Parker, entitled "An Object Lesson in Municipal Govern- 
 ment."
 
 i6o THE CRY OF THE V ULLAGES 
 
 It would be beyond my purpose to deal with all 
 those schemes for improving the condition of the 
 working classes which are occupying the attention 
 and stimulating the expenditure of such bodies as 
 the London County Council and their humbler and 
 only a little less ambitious urban imitators. The 
 point which requires to be insisted on is that in the 
 large towns the munificence of the rich is rapidly 
 tending to overtake the legitimate needs of the 
 masses, and that quite new dangers are threatening 
 us. Already the administration of our charity funds 
 requires close and continued watching to minimise 
 the leakage, to detect the frauds, to stop the extrava- 
 gance and waste which seem almost inseparable 
 from the dispensing of large funds among those 
 for whom they were intended. The existence of 
 the Charity Organisation Society indicates that 
 already the army of well-meaning philanthropists 
 requires a vigilance committee to supervise their 
 varied, ever-varying operations, and a special force 
 of detective officers to protect them from the 
 organised robbery of begging-letter impostors and 
 the knavery of professional tramps. A comfortable 
 income may be made by plausible plunderers who 
 prey upon the weak and indolent ; and there is no 
 lack of foolish, mischievous people, who recklessly 
 throw about guineas without caring who gets
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES i6i 
 
 them, and can never be brought to understand 
 that scrambHng money in the streets with lavish 
 profusion is very much nearer to a crime than a 
 virtue. 
 
 Yet, on the whole, the munificence of the rich in 
 the towns has been directed with a certain measure 
 of wisdom and prudence to a great end ; and that 
 end has been to afford every kind of chance to the 
 working-man to rise step by step to the top of that 
 ladder which we have heard so much of. The 
 elementary school is but the beginning of the 
 townsman's education ; there the children of the 
 operatives are not "educated above their station," 
 because education with them is a continuous process 
 always going on ; all their surroundings exercising 
 upon them a refining and elevating influence through 
 an elaborate machinery which the best men are 
 proud to help in keeping at work, and in enlarging 
 its sphere of usefulness, till it is as if among the 
 favoured townsfolk the path of vice and crime were 
 becoming the only way which it is hard to tread, 
 and the broad and smooth way the road that leads 
 upwards towards the higher life and higher ideals. 
 The artisans of the towns have everything within 
 their reach that may conduce to their happiness and 
 well-being. Is there not some little risk of turning 
 them into the spoilt children of this our age ?
 
 1 62 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 When they call out for sugar-plums they get them. 
 Anything to keep them quiet — sometimes a bicycle, 
 sometimes a pianoforte, sometimes a holiday at the 
 seaside. We shall hear them crying for the moon 
 before long. When they get there they'll want to 
 get back again, and you'll have to fetch them 
 home 1 
 
 Contrast all these surroundings with those of the 
 young agricultural labourer. He has " passed his 
 standards," as the phrase is — and what then ? He 
 goes to work upon the land. There is a common 
 belief that this is a dull and stupid life, dismally 
 lacking in interest, and that the labour required is 
 such as any half-witted bumpkin can do as well as 
 another. I recommend my omniscient friends of 
 the cities who are possessed by this delusion to get 
 up at six o'clock one fine autumn morning and look 
 on while a field of twenty or thirty acres is being 
 set out for ploughing; or to try his hand at thatching 
 a stack or making a wattle fence. The first of these 
 tasks is what the lie-a-bed very rarely sees, but when 
 he does see he will look on with no little perplexity 
 and amazement. Unhappily, we in the country do 
 not use the terms "skilled and unskilled labour," 
 but the things signified by those terms respectively 
 we have a very clear appreciation of. The mischief 
 is that we are losing all skilled labourers alarmingly.
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 163 
 
 We have ourselves to blame in great measure for 
 this. The root of the evil may be traced very far 
 back, and this is not the time to dwell upon it ; but 
 the reason of our best men going from us is not far 
 to seek. It lies in this, that all agricultural labourers 
 are supposed to have a right to receive the same 
 wage, whatever the quality and character of their 
 work may be ; till it has become an axiom that the 
 worst man should get the same pay as the best, and 
 the best has no such career before him as the 
 consciousness of superiority over his fellows con- 
 vinces him he has a right to look forward to. A 
 lad of seventeen or eighteen may have learnt the 
 trick of hanging on to a plough after a fashion ; he 
 can hoe ; he can dig ; he can load a cart with 
 manure ; but he is afraid of a horse (not at all an 
 uncommon failing), and he's not much to be trusted 
 with the cows. Nevertheless, he claims "a man's 
 wages." Yes ! and he gets them. That is, he earns 
 as much as his father or his brothers do ; they may 
 be " skilled labourers," if we only used that term ; 
 he may be "half a fool " — that term we have ! 
 
 But he's a man, and a man's wage he claims. On 
 the other hand, he may be the only really skilled 
 labourer of the family, and he knows that he will 
 earn no more than they or a dozen shifty fellows 
 who are hardly worth their salt. Except only in
 
 1 64 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 harvest time, all the year round his work is over 
 at four o'clock in the afternoon. What is he to 
 do with his magnificent allowance of leisure ? 
 Libraries? Reading Rooms? Museums? Recrea- 
 tion Ground ? Picture Gallery ? Lecture Hall ? 
 Public Garden ? Swimming Bath ? Gymnasium ? 
 Who is to find any of these things for him ? A 
 paternal Government ? What ! a paternal Govern- 
 ment have any care for Hodge ? Or the ratepayers? 
 W^ell, that may come when all the rates are laid 
 upon the parson's tithe ; but as long as the farmers 
 and shopkeepers are still called upon to pay some 
 rates, you'll not get quite unnecessary luxuries pro- 
 vided for the labourers, young and old, at the 
 expense of the ratepayers. 
 
 Even in the towns these things, as I have said, 
 were provided in the first instance by the rich for 
 the poor. Think of what Mr. Quintin Hogg has 
 been doing for the children of the working classes 
 for years past through that unique "means of 
 grace" — the Polytechnic ! It is to me a subject of 
 continual wonder that there is so very little coarse 
 vice to be found in our villages. The young fellows 
 have simply nothing to do for a good thousand 
 hours a year. Has Satan forsaken them that their 
 idle hands hang down by their sides, numbed by 
 mere apathy that makes one yawn to watch ? Put
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 165 
 
 the case of two harmless, hulking lads when the 
 day's work is done lighting upon the original idea of 
 taking a stroll in the gleesome isle of Ely. 
 
 " Where shall us go, Tom ? " 
 
 " Dunno ! Fur as Forty-foot drain ? " 
 
 " Come on ! " 
 
 Not a hedge to blur the horizon. Not a tree for 
 a bird to build in. Not a " public " to stop at. Not a 
 human being to " holler " to. Not a log to sit down 
 on. Not a rat to throw a stone at. Straight as a 
 ruler lies the road — it lies, it never runs — between a 
 pair of black and forbidding dykes too wide to jump 
 over. Why in the name of common sense should 
 those two lads go shambling along together for 
 miles at a stretch, only to reach the Forty-foot drain 
 — unless it be to drown themselves in the dark 
 water, the only conceivable form of pleasurable 
 excitement which could offer itself to such forlorn 
 ones ? 
 
 We in the land of sweetness and light — of course 
 I mean Norfolk — are not as yet so badly off as that, 
 and yet things are not very gay with us. We have 
 still some aspects of nature to charm and allure us ; 
 but the old village life has all faded away — vanished. 
 The rollicking and the practical joking, the dancing 
 round the Maypole, the fighting in the backyard of 
 the alehouse, the stone-throwing, and the mischief
 
 1 66 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 — we can't bring it back. Who would wish to bring 
 it all back ? Barbarism has been replaced by 
 respectability. But is there nothing between bull- 
 baiting and cockfighting, with all the evil that was 
 inseparable from these things, and the condition of 
 moral, social, and intellectual atrophy into which 
 we are sinking, till the very bullocks are scared and 
 the lambs begin to scamper away in fear at the 
 sound of a boisterous laugh ? 
 
 Pillion and pack liave left their track : 
 
 Dead is the " Tally-ho." 
 Steam rails cut down each festive crown 
 
 Of the old world and slow. 
 Jack-in-the-green no more is seen, 
 
 Nor Maypole in the street ; 
 No mummers play on Christmas Day : 
 
 St. George is obsolete. 
 
 By no means the least serious trouble that we are 
 suffering from is that love-making — " sweethearting" 
 we call it among us — is positively dying out. The 
 girls run away from us before the lads are old 
 enough to take to " spooning." By all but universal 
 assent it is agreed among the townsfolk that domestic 
 servants cannot be bred and reared in the streets. 
 So nothing remains but that the housemaids and the 
 nurses and the parlourmaids should be hunted down 
 from every happy village in the east or the west, and 
 so our girls get snapped up like the bullfinches by
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 167 
 
 the birdcatchers. At fourteen years of age away they ' 
 go into service, receiving even at starting such wages 
 as are enough to turn their young heads. Our 
 farmers meet with the greatest difficulty in finding a 
 maid-of-all-work. There are no girls of sixteen or 
 seventeen to be found in our villages. Do you 
 expect the nightingales to sing in your thickets when 
 there are no hen birds to reward them for their 
 song ? Not they. They'll set the leaves a-tremble 
 for a day or two, but their amorous patience is soon 
 exhausted. Away they fly to where the bride hides 
 and flutters — ei se cupit ante v icier i ! 
 
 If peradventure there should appear a comely lass 
 or two at the Rectory, or at the gentleman farmer's 
 or the doctor's yonder, she is just a trifle coy — 
 " praywd," Colin calls her when her chin is perked 
 up at sermon time. She will not walk with the first 
 aspirant to her attention. She somehow makes it 
 felt, if she does not make it known, that she expects 
 a house to live in ; and if she is to settle down in 
 the village that house must be other than a couple 
 of rooms in a Peabody mansion five floors up from 
 the basement. Yes 1 and to the honour of the young 
 suitor, be too thinks that such a bride as she is 
 worthier of something better than the wretched 
 tumble-down shanty in which he himself was born 
 and bred. It is hardly more than a year ago since
 
 1 68 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 a fine manly lad said to me : " I ain't a-going to 
 many till we've got some better housen than they 
 places down there ! " pointing over his shoulder. It 
 is curious to note how this sentiment is slowly acting 
 in the direction of lessening the number of early 
 marriages amongst young men. I know of ten or a 
 dozen unmarried men in a parish of less than seven 
 hundred inhabitants, varying in age from five and 
 twenty to two or three and forty — and four of these 
 are looked upon as " confirmed old bachelors," who 
 profess themselves to be averse from matrimony. 
 This is how the education of the rustics has been 
 "above their station." They are educated above 
 their station — that is, they revolt from being housed 
 worse than the cattle. 
 
 But who is to provide decent houses for the 
 agricultural labourer ? The landlords nowadays 
 cannot live in their own houses, and eagerly let 
 them to provide themselves with more modest 
 homes elsewhere. The land may actually be said 
 not to be paying its expenses. 
 
 If you doubt that, take the trouble to read the 
 Duke of Bedford's remarkable account of his 
 stewardship in regard to his immense landed estates. 
 Even in the best days it appears, according to his 
 Grace's summary, that there is nothing to be made 
 in the long run out of th.e broad acres, if generous
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 169 
 
 treatment or even justice is shown to the wage- 
 earners among the peasantry. But when extensive 
 tracts of land, with good buildings too, are letting 
 in Essex and Suffolk and Norfolk at a rental of five 
 or six shillings an acre, where is the margin to come 
 from wherewith to build houses for the labourers ? 
 
 It is, however, when some outbreak of serious 
 sickness falls upon our villages that the dreadful 
 condition of the cottages in some of our country 
 parishes becomes shockingly apparent. When a 
 whole family has been stricken, and the worst is 
 over; and the weakened and the half-alive cannot 
 render to the delirious or the half-dead the simplest 
 service — when a house is reeking with fever or small- 
 pox, God help those who cannot help themselves ! 
 The excellent association for providing nurses for 
 the poor in the county of Norfolk, which has been 
 worked so well for many years past, and is working 
 so well under very able management, has been an 
 untold blessing to many poor sufferers. But there 
 are whole parishes where a night nurse could not 
 find a bed for herself to lie on, and where a day 
 nurse could not find a slop-pail. I must needs put 
 the matter bluntly ; they who have had some 
 experience of grave sickness in out-of-tiie-way 
 hamlets— and they only — know what I mean. 
 
 I never heard of a country village in my
 
 I/O THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 experience, with even a rudimentary dispensary, 
 where the most simple means and appHances 
 absohitely necessary for accidents and sudden 
 emergencies are kept ready at hand. Yet there 
 are many parishes where the nearest medical man 
 lives live miles off. On one occasion I happened to 
 drop in at a cottage where a girl had tripped and 
 fallen against a pane of glass and " punctured an 
 artery," as I was afterwards informed on the 
 authority of the sapient medico. Gush 1 gush ! 
 gush ! spurted the red blood out from near the 
 temple. I put my finger upon the spot and shrieked 
 for something — anything to stop the flow ! The 
 girl would have bled to death in an hour. I rigged 
 up a iourniqiiet — is that what they call the thing ? — 
 with a bit of cheese-rind — which " lent itself to the 
 occasion " — some dirty rag, string, and two broken 
 lead pencils. And if that young person's forehead 
 wasn't pretty deeply seamed with the whipcord 
 before the surgeon appeared, it wasn't my fault ! 
 
 But the most pitiable object in our village com- 
 munities is a poor fellow " on his club," as the 
 phrase goes ; that is, a man suffering from a hurt or 
 some chronic malady, and whom the doctor has 
 certified is unable to work, and who therefore 
 receives a weekly allowance from his club as long as 
 he remains on the sick list. The unhappy wretch
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 171 
 
 may not even handle a tool ; he may not drive in a 
 nail ; he may not carry a parcel or go on a message ; 
 he may not sit down in a public-house — during all 
 his sick time. Moreover, he is jealously watched by 
 the other members of the club, and if he be of a 
 cheerful temperament, he is pretty sure to be 
 reported as shamming. As often as not the poor 
 fellow has a garden where the potatoes want 
 moulding up, or an allotment where the wheat 
 badly wants hoeing. Not a bit of it ! He may 
 stare at the tall thistles and sigh, but anything in the 
 semblance of labour is denied him ! How he must 
 envy his children at the school ! And what a 
 warning he must be to those same children if they 
 ever think of their poor father's station in life^ 
 beyond which they are being educated so fast ! 
 Some few years ago I put up a seat for these unfor- 
 tunates with a fairly comfortable back, at what used 
 to be called " Wicked Corner " in the old days, and 
 now bears the honoured name of " Church Corner." 
 It is pathetic to see the sickly and the old slowly 
 making their way there and sitting in the sunshine. 
 Now and then a tired tramp sits himself down in a 
 slouching way. He's not allowed to stay there many 
 minutes. "That ain't made for the like o' he," 
 growled a soured old pauper in explanation to me 
 one day. " Lawk 1 If we let him alone, he'd lie
 
 172 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 down there and go to sleep and usurp [There's a 
 pretty word for you !] other folks' rec-re-a-tion 1 " 
 
 So it has come to this, that our only notion of a 
 recreation ground is a deal board with a rail to lean 
 against, at the edge of a ditch and facing the north- 
 east wind ! Not that we have not our cricket field, 
 and a good one too ; but we hold it on the kindly 
 sufferance of Farmer Wade, who keeps it in order 
 and lets us have the use of it rent free. But then he's 
 a trump, he is, and if he's not a lineal descendent 
 of the General Wade who made the great military 
 roads up in the north there, and has the credit of 
 having invented the kilt to clothe the nakedness of 
 the Highlanders, he deserves to be ! 
 
 " Wliat fun it must be to look down from the 
 Pleiades!" said Euphemia Maud the sly and too 
 poetical ! " What fun it must be 1 " she cried, 
 taking very good care to be within earshot of the 
 present writer when the cricket match was going on. 
 But Laura Gladys — a little monitor she — was equal 
 to the occasion. "Ah ! But I'd rather be a mermaid, 
 while all the merry mermen under the sea would 
 feel their immortality die in their hearts for the love 
 of me!" "Ah ! sir, that's what's ruining us! the 
 gals a-talking that kind of stuff. It ain't Christian- 
 like, that ain't ! " growled old Jim Dawes, one of the 
 old but extinct King Coles, who, "though a learned
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 173 
 
 soul, neither write nor read could he ! " " They're 
 a-educating 'em above their station, that's where 
 it is ! " 
 
 No ! No ! Why shouldn't they learn their 
 poetry, and write it, too, if they like ? Bless their 
 darling bright eyes ! The real mischief is that the 
 education all comes to a dead stop among us when 
 they've done with the school. The grim prose of 
 life supervenes with a cruel solution of continuity, 
 and the future is mere vacuity. 
 
 We want our " station " improved — not our 
 education lessened and impaired. 
 
 The poor in the towns have had everything done 
 for them ; ihcir cry is listened to almost before it 
 is uttered. The poor toilers in the rural districts 
 are fretfully told to help themselves. How can they 
 help themselves ? They must, unless they are to 
 disappear out of the land — they must sue in forma 
 pauperis. They want everything that the towns- 
 man claims already as his right : water to drink — 
 houses to live m — resting-places in their weariness — 
 nursing in their sore sickness — common halls, be 
 they ever so humble, where they may hope to get 
 some innocent amusement, diversion, instruction, 
 and rational companionship. Who is to give them 
 these things ?- -the landlords? the tenant farmers ? 
 the parsons ? Such an one as " this humble indi-
 
 174 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 vidual who now addresses you," and who for years 
 past has not derived from his fat benefice enough 
 to provide him with house rent in a second-rate 
 country town ? 
 
 What mockery to bid our poor rustics look to 
 the old helpers, who themselves are hanging on by 
 their eye-lids to their ever- waning resources ! This 
 is no pessimist's whine. It is but the sad cry of 
 those who beg only for the crumbs which fall from 
 the rich man's table. 
 
 Of late we have had more than enough talk about 
 the crisis in the Church, and been working ourselves 
 into a kind of St. Vitus dance because a few hundred 
 clerical nondescripts are threatening to bring back 
 Paganism into our worship, and offering to rid us 
 of the burden of our innermost secrets by polluting 
 others with the recitals of things which we would 
 fain hide from our very selves. Tush ! This is not 
 the crisis. It is only one of the many tricks of the 
 devil and his angels to throw dust in our eyes and 
 to keep us from seeing what the real social and 
 national crisis is which confronts us in very 
 truth. 
 
 With fair land and good land literally dirt cheapo 
 with vast accumulations of untold wealth for which 
 the owners can find no investment, with men and 
 women positively troubled and perplexed by the
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 175 
 
 burden of their riches, and an anxious question, 
 increasing in distinctness, coming up from many a 
 conscience-stricken heart, and asking painfully, 
 "Men and brethren, what shall we do ?" — here is 
 a blessed opportunity for adding to the sum of 
 happiness among the peasantry of England such 
 as never offered itself before, such as may never — 
 will never — occur again if we let this chance go by. 
 After painfully studying this matter in many of 
 its aspects, and especially as it affects what we may 
 call the open parishes, I affirm without hesitation 
 that almost any village in England might be 
 changed in a few years into " a model parish " by 
 the wise expenditure of such an amount of capital 
 as would be a mere insignificant contribution to the 
 vast outlay which our large towns are absorbing 
 annually. Moreover that such an outlay would 
 provide for all the needs of our villagers in per- 
 petuity. God knows I do not grudge the townsmen 
 anything that may promote their happiness and 
 well-being — in the best sense of those words. 
 What I do deeply deplore and protest against is 
 that our poor peasantry should have been so abso- 
 lutely neglected by the philanthropists as they have 
 been during the time when they were least able to 
 help themselves, until at last they are being driven 
 away from the homes of their fathers in despair of
 
 176 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 ever seeing any improvement in their own sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 Actually as I was writing these lines certain Reports 
 of the Peahody Fund and of the Guinness Trust 
 were laid upon my table. From the Report of 
 the Peabody Trustees it appears that at the end 
 of the year 1898 their capital expenditure in land 
 and buildings had amounted to ;^i, 250,390 los. 8d., 
 which had been spent in providing 5,121 separate 
 dwellings comprising 11,367 rooms, the average 
 rent of each room being 2S. 6d. a week. The rent 
 in all cases including the free use of water, laundries, 
 sculleries, and bathrooms. 
 
 The Guinness Trustees report that at an outlay of 
 less than ^300,000, they " have provided 2,208 
 separate dwellings containing 4,568 rooms, besides 
 laundries, club-roans, costers' sheds, perambulatot 
 sheds, &c. . . . The average weekly earnings of each 
 family in residence was i8s. i^d. The average 
 weekly rent of each room was is. lo^d., covering 
 chimney siceeping and the use of Venetian blinds, 
 baths, and hot-ivater supply." It is added, "club or 
 common rooms are provided and supplied with 
 papers, books, games, &c. ;" this last "&c." refers 
 among other luxuries to " tJie boiling water supplied 
 from urns morning and evening for making tea." 
 
 With us in the country things have been allowed
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 177 
 
 to slide too long to permit of our hoping that we 
 can recover lost ground by any coup de main. But 
 is there not splendid encouragement for all good 
 men and women of large resources to abstain from 
 frittering away their money in a lavish and an 
 inconsiderate way, and to urge them to concentrate 
 their efforts upon some really great object ? What 
 greater encouragement could be looked for than 
 that which the immense improvement in the con- 
 dition of the poor in our large cities during a single 
 generation affords ? What greater encouragement, 
 I say, than the success of the noble sacrifices made 
 and the example set by such benefactors as Mr. 
 Peabody and Lord Iveagh ? 
 
 History repeats itself. The time has come when 
 one of those great repetitions of history, which are 
 never mere imitations, seems to invite us to make a 
 new departure. I plead for our rural communities ; 
 I plead for what remains of that sturdy peasantry 
 which were not so very long ago the very pith and 
 marrow, the very backbone of a great people. I 
 plead to you, the rich in this world's wealth, that 
 you should be as ready to give of your overflowing 
 resources only as freely, and not less grandly, in 
 the direction of Social Refonn as your fathers did, 
 centuries ago, in the direction of Religious Reform. 
 Their immense sacrifices for the furtherance of 
 
 '3
 
 178 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 
 
 what they believed to be the religious elevation of 
 their generation succeeded in exercising an incal- 
 culable leverage upon all classes, and all classes, 
 high and low, were verily and indeed lifted up 
 thereby. 
 
 It remains for the men of the present generation 
 to work on different lines, and peradventure by a 
 somewhat different machinery, for the moral and 
 social uplifting of their contemporaries, and for 
 those that may come after. The masses can no 
 longer be left to the Church alone, to deal with 
 as may seem good in the sight of the very best 
 and most earnest and most high-minded of her 
 hierarchy. The masses will not rest satisfied with 
 all that the Church or the Churches have to offer. 
 Let us not be ashamed or afraid to make that 
 confession, however humiliating it may seem to 
 the pride or the assumption of some good men 
 among us. 
 
 That the masses, whether in town or country, 
 can do without religion, I, for one, no more believe 
 than I believe that they can do without water or air. 
 But for all that, I can just as little believe that you 
 can feed and clothe, or even educate the masses by 
 religion alone. It seems to me conceivable that 
 the day may come when men, looking back with 
 larger, other eyes than ours upon the long processes
 
 THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES 179 
 
 and successive steps whereby God has been school- 
 ing and training the successive generations of 
 mankind, may recognise with thankfulness and awe 
 that He has used the magnificent sacrifices and the 
 magnificent labours of His chosen servants in His 
 Church to prepare the men of the future for a 
 higher order of things than that we can yet forecast 
 or imagine. The end of things is not yet. May it 
 not be that we are but at the beginning of the new 
 order which shall change and transcend the old ? 
 
 Be that as it may, we have much work to do if 
 we are not content basely to leave things as they 
 are — tamely acquiescing in a condition of affairs 
 which will take some generous endeavours to 
 amend. 
 
 "The inhabitants of the village ceased !" pealed 
 forth the fiery-hearted prophetess in the bad times, 
 her soul aflame with indignant grief at the craven 
 hearts among the princes. Ay, " the inhabitants 
 of the villages ceased — until that I Deborah arose — 
 I arose a mother in Israel ! " Is there no patriot 
 Deborah in our times, to rise above the wail of 
 lamentation, and to take the gallant leadership of 
 those "who willingly offer themselves"?
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 THERE is nothing which indicates more 
 strikingly the growth of the historic senti- 
 ment among all classes during the last twenty or 
 thirty years than the fashion which has sprung up 
 of celebrating the anniversary of some great event 
 in the remote past, or the birth or death of some 
 distinguished or heroic personage. These celebra- 
 tions have been rapidly increasing upon us of late, 
 not without causing some little bewilderment to 
 worthy people whose knowledge of history is not 
 their strong point. They are surprised to hear 
 that Hungary, for instance, can lay claim to a 
 millennium of anything ; or that there could be any 
 reason why excited experts should go into hysterics 
 because eight centuries had actually been completed 
 since the Domesday Book was drawn up ; or that 
 there was so much that was worth remembering at 
 Durham or Ely or Norwich all those hundreds and 
 hundreds of years ago. Cynical Philistines, on the 
 
 183
 
 1 84 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 other hand, have been prone to ask whether it 
 might not be just as well to let bygones be bygones 
 — whether we are any the better for loading our 
 memories with facts which have travelled down to 
 us from so very long ago that a critical age may be 
 prepared to question whether they are likely to be 
 true ; or whether, if true in the main, much of the 
 glamour which surrounds them may not be due to 
 the mists through which we look back at them — 
 inasmuch as " the past will win a glory from its 
 being far," and also inasmuch as we are agreed that 
 " distance lends enchantment to the view." 
 
 It is always better to let the cynics have their say 
 and to forbear from arguing with them. We and 
 they do not stand upon the same platform, nor 
 start from the same premises. In this particular 
 instance they are in an evil case as being a small 
 sect of unfortunates who count themselves wiser 
 than the rest of us, and yet who are bound to find 
 themselves more and more in a hopeless and soured 
 minority. The spirit of the age is against them, and, 
 however little they may be able to understand it, the 
 truth is that the cynics are always behind, never 
 before, their time. 
 
 Our near neighbours across the Channel have of 
 late been throwing themselves with a great deal of 
 excitement into one anniversary which in its multi-
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 185 
 
 farious pomps and ceremonies made a strong 
 appeal on the one side to the patriotism of 
 Frenchmen, and on the other side to the reHgioiis 
 behefs and aspirations and hopes of the devout and 
 fervent millions of the Catholic population of the 
 great Republic. The Government betrayed no 
 little anxiety as to what might come of it all, 
 and actually put forth stringent orders to restrain 
 the French bishops from meeting in too large 
 numbers simultaneously, lest a religious demonstra- 
 tion on too large a scale should result in some 
 frenzied outbreak which might be dangerous to the 
 public welfare. Sttrioitt pas trop de religion ! seems 
 to be the ruling principle of philosophers who 
 profess unbounded liberty of thought. 
 
 And yet this great French anniversary cele- 
 brated nothing worse than the baptism of Clovis, 
 King of the Franks, in the Cathedral of Reims, on 
 Christmas Day, 496 — the baptism, that is, of the 
 man whom Frenchmen regard as the founder of 
 their national institutions, the beginner of their 
 national life, the establisher of their national faith, 
 the saviour of European society in an age when 
 things were tending towards ciiaos. Whether this 
 view of the case be anything but a hugely exag- 
 gerated view is one question — that it is the view of 
 the average Frenchman whom one meets by the
 
 i86 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 wayside, and who has anything to say of Clovis, is 
 hardly a question at all. Much less is it a question 
 that the event commemorated by this anni- 
 versary in France was one of almost incalcu- 
 lable importance in its influence upon the social, 
 religious, and political sentiments and beliefs of 
 European peoples, nations and languages down to 
 the present hour, and that it marked an epoch in 
 the history of the world. 
 
 Who were these Franks ? When Julius Cnesar, 
 after eight years of ceaseless warfare, effected the 
 complete subjugation of Gaul, fifty-one years before 
 our era, Rome found herself not only with a new 
 dependency to govern, but she found herself with 
 a new race to take account of — a race which for 
 centuries afterwards became an enormous source 
 of wealth and power to the Empire. Gaul in its 
 widest extent comprehended all that is now in- 
 cluded in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and 
 Alsace-Lorraine. 
 
 The inhabitants of this wide territory were of the 
 same blood, with a religion and with a polity of 
 their own. They had something like national 
 assemblies ; they had a powerful priesthood, which 
 exercised great influence over the people ; they 
 were brave, intelligent, rich, and civilised up to that
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 187 
 
 point at which a nation is prepared to assimilate 
 and absorb whatever better things its neighbours or 
 its masters may have to offer. What the Celts are 
 to-day, that they were on the Loire and Seine in 
 Caesar's days ; and what that means I must refer to 
 the great historian of Rome to tell those who would 
 fain know.i The point is, those Gauls were Celts ; 
 while on the other side of the Rhine there were the 
 teeming and restless Teutonic peoples, who for 
 some time past had been finding their own land too 
 strait for them. Not only that, but the climate and 
 the soil of the South were a clime and a soil of a land 
 of promise ; for generations the Teutons had longed 
 to possess that good land so much better than their 
 own. It was in consequence of a great emigration 
 from the upper Rhine by some of these German 
 tribes, resolved on finding a new home for them- 
 selves across the river that C?esar was sent to drive 
 them back. The end was that the Rhine became 
 the boundary between Rome and Germany. When 
 Gaul became a Roman province it was supremely 
 necessary to defend it against the barbarians who 
 should try to cross over. All along its left bank, 
 from Maycnce to Cologne, there was a wide belt 
 which was in fact a gigantic military district 
 
 • Mommscn, " History of Rome," book v. chap, vii, vol i. 
 part i. p. 286, En^^lish translation.
 
 1 88 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 occupied by an army of no less than eight legions, 
 or an aggregate of 100,000 men, cantoned in fifty 
 fortresses or fortified camps. Up and down the 
 stream two fleets were always moving, watching the 
 navigation and the movements of the dwellers on 
 the opposite bank, who were continually threatening 
 to force a passage across the barrier and pour in 
 upon the plains of Gaul. 
 
 It was not long before it was found politic to cut 
 off the northern portion of the new territory, and 
 make of it a new prefecture, under the name of 
 Gallia Belgica. Draw a line on the map from 
 Dieppe to Strasburg, and you may take it that the 
 triangle of which this line is the base, and the Rhine 
 with the coast along the North Sea and the Channel 
 the other two sides, roughly indicates the boundaries 
 of this province, of which in the fourth century the 
 father of St. Ambrose was the governor. Under 
 the wise administration of the Romans this country 
 became one of the most thriving and prosperous 
 dependencies of the Empire. When the poet 
 Ausonius made a voyage hither in the middle of the 
 fourth century, he was enraptured with what he saw 
 as he sailed down the Moselle, more beautiful and 
 more populous than it is to-day. Treves was ac- 
 counted the fourth city of the Empire. It possessed 
 what may be called a university, in which, under the
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 189 
 
 supervision of Lactantius, Constantine's son Crispus 
 probably pursued his studies. Here St. Ambrose 
 was born, and here St. Jerome seems to have spent 
 some years ; and here we are told he went through 
 one of those religious crises in his Hfe which deter- 
 mined his after career. By this time, and perhaps 
 a century at least before this time, the Belgic Gaul 
 was emphatically a Christian land. Soissons, Stras- 
 burg, and Reims had each its bishop, and at Treves 
 there was an archbishop or metropolitan. Trade, 
 commerce, manufactures, and literature too, 
 flourished to a far greater extent than, till com- 
 paratively lately, has been thought. Paris, or 
 Lutetia, in the fourth century could not compare 
 with the splendour of the Belgic cities. Between 
 Reims or Treves and Bordeaux there was no city of 
 any great extent and importance, except perhaps 
 Tours, which was the centre of South Gallic as 
 Reims was of Belgic Christianity. 
 
 It was within the borders of this much-favoured 
 land that the Franks had succeeded in establishing 
 themselves at least as early as the beginning of the 
 fifth century, when Rome had been compelled to 
 withdraw the legions from the defence of the Rhine, 
 and had left the Belgian Celts to protect themselves. 
 We first meet with the name of Franks in the year 
 242, when they were so inconsiderable a company
 
 igo THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 that a tribune of a legion could disperse and crush 
 them ; and during the third and fourth centuries 
 we come upon them as mere bands of marauders, 
 always beaten and put to flight, but collecting again 
 in formidable associations, as gatherings of outlaws 
 on a small scale have been wont to do in unsettled 
 times, and are likely to do again. In the latter half 
 of the fourth century the pressure upon the Goths 
 and German tribes by the movements of the Huns 
 was continually increasing, and forcing the former 
 across the Danube and the latter across the Rhine. 
 Gradually and somewhat rapidly these Franks 
 appear to have become constituted into something 
 like a nation, and under the name of Ripuarian and 
 Salian Franks — the one hovering upon the right 
 bank of the Rhine, the others roaming among the 
 fastnesses of the lowlands at the mouth of the 
 Schelde or the great forests of the Silva Carbonaria 
 and the Ardennes — had developed into a disciplined 
 force which even Attila and Aetius had to reckon 
 with, and whose tactics in warfare were peculiarly 
 their own. When Attila crossed the Rhine some- 
 where near its mouth, he appears to have driven the 
 Franks before him, only to make them join the 
 legions of Aetius ; and under this commander they 
 contributed materially to the reverse which the 
 Huns suffered at Chalons. Attila led his hosts back
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 191 
 
 across the Rhine at Cologne, and as he retreated we 
 may reasonably infer that the Franks followed in 
 his wake and returned to their settlements in the 
 Belgian province. 
 
 At this point in Prankish history we find our- 
 selves very much in the dark. We are confronted 
 by legend and fable ; mythical personages appear 
 out of the mists, and names of kings who are 
 like the knights of King Arthur, and of whose actual 
 existence grave doubts have been expressed by 
 scholars with a right to the opinions they hold. 
 Meanwhile we have not yet found a distinct answer 
 to the question who these Franks were, and whether 
 they were in any true sense a nation when we hear 
 of them first, or whether they only grew into an 
 organic polity out of a mere aggregate of hungry 
 and desperate vagabonds, pretty much in the same 
 way that Saxons and Parisians and Angles, and other 
 marauders who poured into Britian when the island 
 was deserted by the Roman legions, became con- 
 solidated into a nation among ourselves. 
 
 The tendency of German scholars is to maintain 
 the view that the Franks were the lineal descendants 
 of one or other of those Teutonic peoples whose 
 valour and whose virtues Tacitus has immortalised \^ 
 
 ■ Not " German scholars," liowevcr, only. The most extra- 
 vagant of the supporters of this view was M, Meet de la Forte
 
 192 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 and one of the last supporters of this theory has 
 gone so far as to suggest that they were the 
 decendants of that great group of tribes whom 
 Tacitus calls the Istaevones, and who claimed 
 to be descended from the gods of the land. How 
 these people lost the old name and got to adopt 
 the more modern one we are not informed. 
 Gibbon, with that unique sagacity of his, forbears 
 from anything which could pledge himself to more 
 than a single phrase might express, and speaks as if 
 there could be no doubt that the Franks were a 
 confederacy ; implying that their early organisation 
 was the result of a settled compact among the 
 members of which it was composed. On the 
 other hand, the French school of historians, 
 under the inspiration of a thinker of brilliant 
 genius, the late I\I. Fustel de Coulanges, rejects 
 even the theory of a confederacy of Germanic 
 tribes, and, dismissing it as a pure hypothesis 
 lacking any evidence for its support, denounces 
 with vehement emphasis the notion that the Franks, 
 when we come upon them first in the third century, 
 were a nation at all.^ M. Fustel, with his usual 
 
 Maison in his extremely learned work " Les France, cur origin 
 et leur histoire," 2 vols., 8vo (Paris, 1868). 
 
 ' "L'Invasion Germanique et la fin de 'Empire" (Paris, 
 1 891). See the brilliant tenth chapter of the Second Book, 
 p. 460 et seq.
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 193 
 
 exhaustive elaboration and argumentative force, 
 insists that, long before the third century, those 
 German tribes of whom Tacitus wrote — perhaps 
 more as a philosopher than as an historian — had, 
 by their continual internecine wars and by the 
 frightful and pitiless slaughter inflicted upon them 
 by Rome, ceased to exist as organised clans or 
 tribes ; and that the Franks were the mere scattered 
 survivors— the wrecks— of the Chauci, Catti, 
 Cherusci, and Sigambri, who were simply swept 
 away like the doomed aborigines of America and 
 Africa ; that their very names would have been 
 blotted out of human memory if it had not been 
 that the bards and popular singers of a later time 
 kept up the old traditions of their fabled prowess. 
 This view, in the main, seems to the present writer 
 the only view that serves to explain the facts that 
 have come down to us, and the only view that helps 
 us to account for the origin and significance of 
 the name Franks which these people earned or 
 adopted, and in which they gloried. For the 
 word seems to mean Roamers or Wanderers, and 
 may well have been applied to restless companies of 
 soldiers of fortune who, as wc know they did, 
 were ready to take service in the Roman armies 
 (in which some of them rose to be commanders 
 of eminence) or, failing to find what they sought in 
 
 14
 
 194 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 the way of pay, engage in expeditions on their 
 own account — Hke the White Companies of the 
 Middle Ages — wandering as far as Spain, or preying 
 upon the outskirts of the Rhenish border when the 
 chance of making a raid occurred, as it must have 
 done from time to time. 
 
 The passage of the Danube by the Visigoths 
 in 376 was the beginning of the end for Rome's 
 imperial prestige. The passage of the Rhine thirty 
 years later was, as Gibbon pronounced, the invasion 
 that sealed the fate of Roman civilisation. Bur- 
 gundians and Suevi and Vandals came pouring 
 in upon the broad lands and cities made ready 
 for the spoil. The stream went rushing over 
 Western Europe ; it did not stop till it had over- 
 flowed Gaul and Spain and North Africa. Every- 
 where there was pillage, devastation, obliteration. 
 Four times during that dreadful fifth century was 
 Rome herself stormed and sacked. Practically, 
 however much theorists of the doctrinaire class 
 may protest against the admission, the Roman 
 Empire in the West came to an end in the year 
 476 ; it was Charlemagne who restored it and once 
 again made the name of Roman Emperor a reality. 
 But while the Teuton hordes were spreading them- 
 selves over the more southerly regions, plundering^ 
 burning, and slaying, the Franks in the old Belgic
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 195 
 
 province were, as far as appears, content to remain 
 at home. They were not all men of war, there 
 were those who were tillers of the soil; the land 
 could not be left desert. Moreover, though the 
 fighting class might be pagans, if anything, all 
 below the heroes were Christians, with a strong 
 attachment for and confidence in their clergy, 
 and an almost unbounded reverence for their 
 bishops, in whose hands the civil administration 
 was left : they were the arbiters of all disputes 
 which did not require to be settled by the sword — 
 their word was law. The true Franks, as by this 
 time they had got to call themselves — the Franks 
 who were the warrior class and looked down with 
 immeasurable contempt upon priests and people in 
 whose veins no royal blood was coursing — they 
 let their hair grow to its full length and fall over 
 their shoulders (in battle they managed to pack 
 it under their helmets); ferocious and careless of life, 
 they knew no fear, and loved fighting for fighting's 
 sake, as men love hunting for hunting's sake while 
 recking nothing of the quarry. But these haughty 
 swashbucklers all boasted of their divine origin — 
 whatever that might mean — and every one of them, 
 in his own opinion, was worthy to be a king. Such 
 "kings" were for ever starting up among them, 
 enjoying here and there a brief reign. The time
 
 iQfi THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 was sure to come when some strong man, higher by 
 a head and shoulders than all the rest, like Saul, the 
 son of Kish — a man of force of will and power of brain, 
 masterful, irresistible — a king by the grace of God 
 indeed — should win the ascendency which none 
 could gainsay, and who at some great crisis should 
 be recognised as the peerless leader and commander 
 of the people. When such a man was firmly 
 seated on his throne he would be likely to think of 
 founding a dynasty. And thus it came to pass. 
 
 When, in the spring of that dreadful year 451, 
 Attila led his enormous hosts across the Rhine, 
 he seems to have passed that river at several points, 
 extending his front all along the bank from Stras- 
 burg as far as Cologne.^ He himself with the 
 central force appears to have got possession of 
 Coblentz and laid waste the valley of the Moselle. 
 The right wing of the invading army, crossing 
 at Cologne, made straight for the valley of the 
 Meuse, and, finding themselves in face of the 
 Carbonarian forest, revenged themselves for their 
 disappointment at discovering less booty than 
 they looked for by perpetrating every kind of 
 hideous cruelty upon the miserable inhabitants 
 wherever they came. This seems to have been 
 
 ' Sec M. Amedec Thierry's "Attila" (Paris, 1865), vol. i. 
 p. 136 et seq.
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 197 
 
 the army that at one time threatened Paris and 
 spread agonies of terror among the panic-stricken 
 inhabitants. What Joan of Arc did for Orleans 
 a thousand years later, that Genoveva, the sainted 
 heroine of the fifth century, is said to have done 
 for Paris. But the truth seems to be that Attila, 
 though giving a certain measure of licence to 
 his auxiliaries, had no design of letting them go 
 their own way. He had a definite plan of cam- 
 paign : his objective was Orleans, and the scattered 
 hosts, though allowed to ravage and slay, were to be 
 concentrated at Chalons-sur-Marne for a forward 
 movement against the Visigoths. At the right 
 moment the pack of bloodhounds that were 
 plundering here and there were called back to 
 heel when they had advanced no further to the west 
 than Reims, from which place the legends seem to 
 indicate that they were summoned to headquarters 
 before they had had time to complete the looting of 
 the defenceless city. All that portion of Belgic Gaul 
 to the west of a line from the right bank of the 
 Marne below Chalons, and taking in the whole basin 
 of the Schelde, suffered comparatively little from the 
 Huns; and when Attila, foiled at Orleans and com- 
 pelled to retreat from Chalons, made his way back 
 again to the right bank of the Rhine, Belgic Gaul 
 found itself nominally indeed still a Roman province
 
 198 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 — but in point of fact it was a territory that was 
 derelict. If the people could find themselves a 
 king, there was little or nothing to prevent them 
 from making their choice. 
 
 Some ten years after the death of Attila, two 
 strong men were rivals for the supremacy over this 
 no man's land ; Egidius, a representative of a 
 powerful family among the Gallo-Romans of the 
 south, and therefore probably of Celtic blood, 
 represented the old Roman domination ; and 
 Childeric, son of Meroveus the Frank, and there- 
 fore presumably sprung from a Teutonic stock, 
 Egidius perhaps bore the title of " King of the 
 Romans," Childeric that of King of the Franks ; 
 the first held his court at Soissons, the second at 
 Tournay.^ 
 
 In the autumn of 464 Egidius died of the plague ; 
 he left a son behind him, Syagrius by name, who 
 succeeded to his father's possessions and was 
 "king" at Soissons. Two years later to Childeric 
 a son was born, Clovis, the real founder of the 
 empire of the Franks. Of his boyhood and early 
 youth we know hardly anything ; indeed only this, 
 that his father died in 481 and that the lad of fifteen 
 succeeded to the crown. From the time of the 
 
 ' Soissons, on the left bank of the Aisne, midway between 
 Reims and Compiegne. Toiirnay, on the Upper Schelde.
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 199 
 
 young hero's birth till the year 486, i.e.y till he was 
 twenty years old, there is a provoking blank in 
 Prankish history. We are left to conjecture what 
 course events were taking by reasoning back from 
 the crisis that came at last. It looks as if Clovis, 
 during the first five years of his reign, was making 
 his preparations for what was inevitable, and was 
 extending his influence in the basin of the Schelde 
 and along the left bank of the Meuse. Probably, 
 too, he pushed southward and westward as far 
 as the Somme, making himself master of Cam- 
 bray, Arras, and Therouanne — possibly too of 
 Boulogne. 
 
 To the south of the Somme were the rich valleys 
 of the Aisne and of the Marne, and further still there 
 were the boundless possibilities which invited with 
 irresistible allurement the ambition of a young 
 warrior whose heart was all aflame with thoughts 
 of conquest. 
 
 Observe that Soissons was at this time almost the 
 richest and the most beautiful city of Belgic Gaul. 
 When the mixed multitude of barbarians rushed 
 across the Rhine in 406, Soissons had escaped the 
 havoc. When Attila, again, and his motley host 
 spread themselves over the Belgic plains, Soissons 
 once more was spared. It had its aqueducts, its 
 churches — six or eight of them, it seems — its
 
 200 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 splendid palace for the governors of the city in the 
 old Roman times ; great roads ran from it to 
 Amiens on the west, to Reims on the south-east, 
 to Vermand on the north. There had been great 
 factories here of military engines, and farms ; out- 
 side the city walls there were splendid monuments 
 to the nobles whom Soissons delighted to honour. 
 And but a day's journey off there were Rouen and 
 Beauvais, and Senlis and Meaux and, noblest and 
 grandest of all, Reims, where the great bishop, the 
 sainted Remigius (about whom there is so much to 
 tell, if this were the time and place to tell it), was 
 exercising a mighty moral and intellectual influence 
 which to the fierce men of battle was inexplicable, 
 awful, and at times inspired in them a mysterious, 
 overmastering dread. All this goodly region seems 
 to have been in some sort Syagrius's patrimony ; it 
 counted as his kingdom. And he called himself a 
 king by right of imperial appointment; he and none 
 other was Rex Roiuanonmi. 
 
 A Roman forsooth ! A Roman 1 When there 
 was no longer any emperor nearer than Constanti- 
 nople, and when ten years before this the giant 
 Odoacer had scornfully flouted the puppets that 
 were playing at sovereignty on the Tiber and had 
 gone very far indeed to make the world recognise 
 that Rome's empire, in the West at any rate, was a
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 201 
 
 sham. Let the new nationahties rouse themselves 
 and awake from their dreams ; there had been 
 enough of dreaming ! The time had come when 
 such a born king of men as Clovis — he was twenty 
 years old now — could no longer tolerate the empty 
 fiction of a Rex Romanorum on his borders. 
 
 " Let us bring this matter to an issue, thou and L 
 Let us look one another in the face and play the 
 game of battle for high stakes and not for love. Let 
 us see which is the stronger, thou of the Celtic 
 blood or I the Teuton — thou the Roman, I the 
 barbarian. Let us see whether the land shall be 
 mine or thine ! " 
 
 So they joined battle a league or two to the north 
 of Soissons. Syagrius, with the remnants, or it may 
 be the shadows, of the Roman legions in Gaul and 
 such other men-at-war as he could muster, was 
 smitten hip and thigh and his army was scattered, 
 and he himself fied away to the court of the 
 Visigoths at Toulouse. Thence they sent him back 
 in chains to Soissons ; and there Clovis smote 
 off his head. P^or the duties of hospitality — or 
 any other duties for that matter — and the softer 
 emotions of pity or generosity — or any other soft 
 emotions — existed only in embryo in those terrible 
 days ; such virtues were for women and priests to 
 talk about, not for men of the flowing locks and
 
 202 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 the sword that wins plunder and carves out empires 
 for such as can greatly dare.^ 
 
 There was no stopping now. To the long-haired 
 Franks victory meant pillage unsparing. Soissons 
 was sacked, the churches looted, the sacred vessels 
 piled up in giant mounds of plunder for division 
 among the spoilers. Hence that famous incident 
 of the chalice or vase that St. Remigius — if it were 
 he — begged might be reserved. Clovis would fain 
 have kept it back; an unnamed fierce soldier 
 shivered it with his battle-axe. But take note that 
 already we find the grim king in some intimate 
 relations with the Gallic episcopate. The bishops 
 were clearly a power to reckon with ; if the Franks 
 were to go on conquering and to conquer, the 
 Church, through her clergy, must be left to govern 
 the lands that were won. In that fifth century 
 there was no country — not even Italy — that was 
 from end to end so completely Christianised as Gaul. 
 The Church was the only organised force that men 
 looked to for protection, for justice, for hope of 
 salvation in this world and the next. "The Church," 
 as one has well put it,2 "had grown in esteem and 
 
 ' Fnstel dc Coulanges, " L'Invasion Germanique," p. 490, 
 where all accessible original sources are not only referred to 
 but quoted. 
 
 ' Dean Kitchin, " History of France," vol. i. book i. chap. vii.
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 203 
 
 wealth . . . the bishops became both spiritual and 
 temporal lords. The bishop, invested by the simple 
 barbarians with a strange sanctity, was listened to 
 with awe. His confidence in his mission, his high 
 training, his dress, his education, the spiritual power 
 he asserted — all deeply touched his conqueror. It 
 is said that even Attila carried Lupus, Bishop of 
 Troyes, with him to the Rhine that he might get 
 the benefit of his sanctity as a kind of charm. 
 Remigius certainly acquired a mighty influence 
 over Clovis." 
 
 The king had by this time deserted Tournay ; he 
 made Soissons his residence now. But Soissons 
 might be a fortress or might be a palace; forty miles 
 off to the eastward lay Reims, the city which was 
 regarded in the fifth century as the religious metro- 
 polis of all Gaul to the north of the Loire, as Tours 
 was, and perhaps more truly was, the sacred city of 
 the south. Reims had not only its amphitheatre, its 
 baths, " which Constantine the Great had built 
 there," its triumphal arches, " one of which 
 remains," its circuit of walls, and, outside these, 
 splendid villas which represented the wealth and 
 grandeur of the neighbourhood, in that happy 
 fourth century of our era when there were no 
 dangers from barbarian invasions ; but the city was 
 rich in churches and oratories, tombs of saints and
 
 204 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 martyrs with a local reputation, and, above all, the 
 cathedral, then of small proportions as compared 
 with the superb and magnificent edifice which now 
 stands up proudly as the matchless triumph of 
 mediaeval architecture and the despair of our modern 
 artists, who have lost touch with the enthusiasm and 
 the aspirations of the past. Obviously Reims in 
 that year, 486, swarmed with clergy, all held well in 
 hand under the authority and discipline of a prelate 
 whose courage, sanctity, elevation of character, 
 quickness of wit, and lofty wisdom contributed to 
 secure to him as boundless an ascendency over 
 those who had everything to gain by peace as Clovis 
 himself, colossal as his image appears to us as we 
 look back upon him, could exercise by the tremen- 
 dous force of his irresistible will upon the grizzly 
 warriors who had everything to gain by war. A 
 sort of tacit understanding seems to have been come 
 to, which was but the continuation of the under- 
 standing between the Romans and the Celtic nobility 
 and landed gentry in the earlier times. The Franks 
 were to be men of the sword. The bishops were to 
 be the civil rulers — of the subdued. 
 
 The men who make empires for themselves are 
 and must always be men of policy as well as men of 
 war. Clovis was both to a pre-eminent degree. He 
 saw that with the effective support of the bishops.
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 205 
 
 in whose hands the administration of the country 
 lay, there would be no fear of any revolt of the 
 people. He was a pagan, as were the majority of 
 his Prankish captains, but this paganism of theirs 
 was rather a confused superstition than a religion ; 
 a matter of omens and magic and sorcery, of witches 
 and prophetesses and unmeaning observances and 
 irrational terrors. We hardly hear anything of gods 
 or demons, and, I think, nothing of temples or idols 
 or sacrifices — the Franks knew not what they 
 believed. As for these Christian folk, somehow 
 they were the better for their creed ; let them keep 
 to it, why meddle with them ? Yes 1 and there was 
 something more. Those other barbarian invaders 
 had got themselves wrong with the bishops and 
 clergy in the lands where they had settled. Vandals 
 and Visigoths and Burgundians were not pagans ; 
 they were professing Christians, and had brought a 
 form of Christianity with them which was hateful to 
 the people whom they had subdued. These latter 
 called it a degradation of Christianity ; they branded 
 it with the name of Heresy; they spat at the heretics 
 whom they stigmatised as the worst of all heretics, 
 Arians to wit, and shut them out of their churches 
 where they dared till they should renounce and 
 abjure their errors. Then was war in the gates I 
 Visigoths and Burgundians and Vandals turned
 
 2o6 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 persecutors of the orthodox creed, and there was 
 variance and hatred between the new comers and 
 the old dwellers in the conquered lands. Dissension 
 everywhere, harmony nowhere. Only Theodoric 
 the Great, Arian though he were, let his people 
 believe and worship pretty much as they pleased ; 
 even the very Jews he would protect and defend. 
 Clovis saw that the man who had the bishops of 
 Gaul on his side would become master of Gaul from 
 end to end. From the first he pursued the policy 
 of conciliating them ; and in all the wars and 
 annexations of territory that were crowded into the 
 next few years, and which ended in making him 
 master of all Gaul north of the Loire, the clergy 
 were his staunch supporters. In humbling the 
 Arians he was strengthening his bishops and 
 himself. 
 
 Then came a proud moment for the king. In 492 
 Theodoric the Great asked for the hand of Adolfleda, 
 one of the sisters of Clovis, in marriage. It was an 
 alliance which brought together in friendly rela- 
 tions the two greatest potentates in Europe, though 
 the empire of Theodoric did not last. Clovis was 
 in his twenty-sixth year, and was still unmarried ; 
 he, too, determined to take a wife, but she should 
 be a princess. Along the eastern borders of his 
 dominions there lay the Burgundian kingdom. This
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 207 
 
 people were settled in the valley of the Rhone ; 
 they, too, were Arians. Be it remembered, as I 
 hinted just now, that this Arianism — this exotic as I 
 may say — this outlandish religion imported from 
 foreign parts, necessarily brought it about that 
 between the dominant new rulers of the land and 
 the older tillers of the soil, with their bishops and 
 clergy at their head, there were " strained relations " ; 
 much in the same way as it is over more than half 
 of Ireland now, when the landlords profess one 
 faith and the masses another. 
 
 In these days there were two brothers who were 
 "kings" of the Burgundians ; the one, Gondebald, 
 reigned at Vienne on the Rhone, the other, Godegisil, 
 at Geneva. There had been a third brother, Chil- 
 perc, who had reigned at Lyon, but he had lately 
 died, leaving a widow — she was not an Arian, but 
 one of the orthodox Catholics — and a daughter 
 Clotilda, who was being brought up under her 
 mother's care. When Chilperic died, mother and 
 daughter put themselves under the protection of 
 Godegisil at Geneva, and there, says the chronicler, 
 they busied themselves in works of charity and 
 devotion. Of course we are told that Clotilda was 
 beautiful as well as good, and certainly she was 
 zealous for her religion and true to her mother's 
 creed. There are some reasons for believing that
 
 2o8 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 Godegisil himself had less sympathy with the Arian 
 heresy than his brother Gondebald. Clovis asked 
 for the hand of Clotilda, apparently at the same 
 time that Theodoric had made his advances to 
 Clovis for his sister's hand ; and in the year 492 
 [or 493 ?] the nuptials of the pagan king of the 
 Franks with the Christian maiden were celebrated 
 with great pomp at Soissons. The event produced 
 a profound impression ; it clearly was sanctioned by 
 the Church, it opened out a great future for the faith 
 once delivered to the saints — for is it not written 
 that " the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the 
 wife ? " — it seemed to foreshadow that the Gospel 
 might have great triumphs to exult in even in the 
 near future. In very truth the marriage of Clovis 
 was one of those events the consequences of which 
 it is difficult to exaggerate. 
 
 Clovis, looked at from our modern standpoint, 
 was a monster of wickedness — cruel, false, relentless, 
 implacable, fiercely vindictive, sparing none in his 
 wrath, and, if we may believe all that is told of his 
 atrocities, with a certain wild beast's joy in blood- 
 shed. But this savage with the tiger's temper was 
 not profligate. He was the only one of his race 
 who, as far as we know, was true to the woman who 
 was his wife, and the only one whose relations with 
 the other sex exhibit anything approaching to tender-
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 209 
 
 ness and romance. The wandering loves of the 
 Merovingians are continually befouling the pages of 
 Gregory of Tours. They are scarcely less shocking 
 and detestable than the wanton carnage. But on 
 Clovis his wife Clotilda never ceased to exercise an 
 influence for good. 
 
 In her presence there appears to have flashed 
 upon him now and then gleams of the inner light 
 that comes from God. She spoke to him out of her 
 own experience of the beauty of holiness. She had 
 a mysterious language which prattled of " the soul " 
 and " the spirit," words that, coming from her, 
 might for all he knew have some occult meaning. 
 So much of the thing men call their hearts this 
 woman had made him suspect there might be 
 under that shaggy bosom of his, something that 
 thrilled with a tremor that was not all animal 
 passion as he gazed into her unfathomable eyes. 
 She spoke to him of the Crucified — the highest, 
 holiest manhood, the human and Divine — that came 
 to suffer and save ; the strong Son of God, " stronger 
 even tiian thou, my Clovis ! Yea, very much 
 stronger than thou I " 
 
 Then a child was born to the pair. There was an 
 heir to the throne. " Christ claims him," said 
 Clotilda, and Clovis acknowledged the claim. So 
 the babe was brought to the font in the Cathedral of 
 
 ^5
 
 210 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 Soissons, decked out for the ceremony with all 
 imaginable splendour, and there they gave him the 
 name of Ingomir — hope of the dynasty that was to 
 be. Alas 1 the child had scarcely been stripped of 
 his baptismal robe before the light went out from 
 the palace. The little heart stopped beating, and he 
 was gone. 
 
 " It's his baptism that was the death of him," 
 cried the king in his wrath. " Had I but given him 
 to those old gods of mine he would have been alive 
 now ! " Clotilda knew when to speak and when to 
 be silent. She bowed her head and made no mur- 
 muring. The Christ had found a better home for 
 the child. 
 
 Next year another son was born. Unshaken in 
 her faith, Clotilda claimed that he too should be 
 baptized. Again after the child had been admitted 
 into the Christian Church he began to sicken. 
 " He too will die as his brother did," growled Clovis 
 brutally. " What else could happen to him ? Of 
 course he'll die ! " But he did not die ; he recovered 
 and grew strong. The leaven was working, we 
 cannot doubt, silently, peradventure sullenly. It is 
 surely, surely a very superficial view of such cases 
 as this of the conversion of Clovis to account for 
 them on the simple hypothesis that they were 
 brought about by the huckster's way of settling
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 21 1 
 
 everything — to wit, by striking a balance between 
 profit and loss. 
 
 When we look at it, how small a part does what 
 we call motive play in the heroism, the romance, or 
 the self-surrender which glorify with a celestial 
 radiance some few pages of human history ! "Who 
 can understand his errors ? " says the Psalmist ; 
 those tortuous mazes in whose labyrinthine entangle- 
 ments moves that undistinguishable throng of hopes 
 and fears which kindle hope, the whispers from 
 worlds not realised, the regrets, the yearnings, the 
 aspirations, the unaccountable whims that play upon 
 the surface, or the outbursts of heat and flame that 
 seem to come from the central fires. Who can tell 
 how these mysterious factors contribute, each in 
 some inexplicable way, in determining what decision 
 we shall come to, or what course we shall take, at 
 this or that turning-point of our careers ? One 
 thing is quite certain— namely, that we are not all 
 brain, neither does logic rule the children of men. 
 
 Just at this time two sisters of Clovis gave up 
 their Arianism or their paganism — it is not clear 
 which — and were admitted to baptism. There are 
 other hints, or at least indications, that there was a 
 propaganda going on. Remigius was all this while 
 the Primate, exercising his mighty influence at 
 Reims, and Principius, the Primate's brother, was
 
 212 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 Bishop of Soissons. The fame of the elder brother 
 and the splendour of his genius — his moral and his 
 intellectual genius — have tended, perhaps unfairly, 
 to rob the younger of his due. It can hardly have 
 been but that the continued presence of one or 
 other of the brothers — their example, their con- 
 versation, and the high estimation in which they 
 were held — must have made itself felt, and that 
 the " continual dropping " was doing its work. 
 
 In the year 496 the crisis came. The Franks by 
 this time had become what the Roman legions were 
 in the first half of the fourth century, the warders 
 of the left bank of the Rhine. On the right bank 
 there had grown up a strong people whom Julian 
 had tried conclusions with — whom Probus, a 
 hundred years before Julian, had attempted to 
 keep back by constructing that tremendous rampart 
 known as the " Devil's Dyke," and which proved 
 such a vain defence against these same Alamanni 
 only a few years later. Gradually the Alamanni 
 had become a great host, fierce and aggressive, 
 bent on conquest. They seem to have crossed 
 the Rhine at Coblentz, and were threatening to 
 wrest the valley of the Moselle from the Franks 
 now settled there. What followed we are not told, 
 (or at this point we are once more tantalised by the
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 213 
 
 silence of historians ; and where the final conflict 
 took place we cannot tell. As the battle raged, the 
 issue seemed to be dreadfully doubtful, for the 
 Alamanni were gaining ground, the Franks were 
 giving way. In the heart of their great leader there 
 came a horror, a weird shiver of dread. Were the 
 gods, from whom he was sprung, forsaking him at 
 this supreme moment ? Was there to be no more 
 help from them ? He lifted up his hands to heaven 
 and a cry came from his lips : " O Thou, Jesus 
 Christ, whom my Clotilda proclaims to be the 
 Son of the living God Thou who art said to 
 give help to those in trouble and victory to those 
 that hope in Thee. Give me but a token of that 
 power of Thine which the people called by Thy 
 name affirm that they have found in Thee, and I 
 too will believe in Thee and be baptized in Thy 
 name ! F^or, lo ! my gods have gone away from 
 me, and I find they have no might. Thee now I 
 call to mine aid ! In Thee will I trust to grant me 
 deliverance from the foe !" The answer came with 
 no lightnings from heaven nor any thunders from 
 the clouds ; but in the king's heart there blazed 
 forth the flame of a new enthusiasm. The wavering 
 and half-beaten Franks rallied, charged, and drove 
 the barbarian host before them as chaff before the 
 wind. Their leader was shiin on the field. Of the
 
 214 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 Alamanni we hear no more, "On that day," says 
 one, "the centre of gravity of history was changed." 
 By which I suppose he means that stable equili- 
 brium for European society in the future was to 
 depend not upon the support which mere brute 
 force could supply, but upon that which it could 
 receive from the spiritual and moral forces which 
 are the real arbiters of human destiny. On that 
 day, whatever there was that was good in the old 
 civilisation was saved from shipwreck. The cause 
 of progress for our race became identified with the 
 cause of the Christian Church. A new era had 
 begun. 
 
 Clovis kept his promise. It was a hard promise 
 to keep, and nothing can show how immense was 
 the influence which the barbarian conqueror exer- 
 cised over those wild warriors than that they joined 
 him by the thousand in renouncing the old gods of 
 war and in bowing their knees to the Prince of 
 Peace. History has many instances of the same 
 acceptance of the gospel by a rude people where 
 their king has had the courage to show them the 
 way. But the significance of this great event lay 
 here, in that Clovis dared to take the first great step. 
 Others might follow, he led. 
 
 Between the great victory over the Alamanni and 
 Christmas Day 496 some months elapsed. Of course
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 215 
 
 there are the usual traditions, legends, peradventure 
 too, devout inventions, some of them one would 
 wish to be able to believe ; but for the most part 
 they come to us from sources that are not above 
 suspicion. As for the magnificence of the cere- 
 monial when the king was admitted to the font, 
 it may be read in the pages of Gregory of Tours, 
 and in this instance we can hardly be wrong in 
 thinking that the good man's pen, so far from 
 exaggerating, was not by any means equal to the 
 occasion. Reims was all astir with the men of 
 war and the men x)f peace. No such magnificent 
 ceremonial had ever been seen, at any rate north of 
 the Alps. Through the streets of Reims, lined by 
 his Franks on this side and on that, Clovis walked, 
 the Bishop Remigius holding him by the hand, 
 conducting him on his way to the cathedral church. 
 Banners and tapestry were, we are told, hung out 
 from the windows as the procession moved on — 
 bishops of the province and ecclesiastics of this 
 grade and of that, in cope and chasuble and 
 dalmatic, gorgeous in colour and dazzling with 
 gems and gold, singing the praises of the Lamb 
 of God in barbaric tones tliat a hundred years 
 later were brought into new measures and lifted 
 to the glorious level of the Gregorian chants. As 
 they entered the great western doors, where the
 
 2i6 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 blaze of a myriad tapers was wellnigh lost in the 
 clouds of incense that filled the church with an 
 overpowering fragrance, Clovis for one moment 
 paused. " Is this the heaven that ye bring me to ?" 
 he asked of the Bishop, who still held his hand. 
 " Nay 1 my king ; this is not heaven, but it is the 
 way to heaven for thee ! " 
 
 The great moment came at last. The saintly 
 Bishop, standing by the font, was really the com- 
 manding figure at that solemn moment. "Bend 
 low thy head, Sigambrian," cried he. "Adore thou 
 that which aforetime thou gavest to the flames ! 
 Let the flames have now what aforetime thou didst 
 adore I " 
 
 There is no need to carry on the story of Clovis 
 and his conquests to the end. It is a story which 
 is not edifying — at any rate not edifying to those 
 who, as they read the great dramas of the ages 
 behind us, have no eyes but for the acting of the 
 puppets on the stage. It is for the philosophic 
 historian to justify the ways of God to men. I 
 do but aim at pointing out briefly the meaning of 
 a single anniversary and the transcendent impor- 
 tance of the event. Few great conquerors have 
 achieved so much as Clovis with resources, at first
 
 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 217 
 
 sight, so inadequate to the success achieved. When 
 he died he was but forty-five years old. At fifteen 
 he began his career as httle more than a leader 
 of outlaws ; he ended by being king of almost 
 the whole land from the Pyrenees to the Rhine. 
 He founded a dynasty, but he did very much more : 
 he founded an empire. The dynasty came to an 
 end, the empire lasted. For wellnigh four hundred 
 years after that Christmas baptism at Reims, there 
 was no people in Europe, except the Franks, which 
 developed into an organised national community 
 or could boast of an uninterrupted national history. 
 If the title of the First Christian King which has 
 been bestowed upon him be something more than 
 he deserved, it still remains true that he was the 
 first barbarian chieftain whose profession of Chris- 
 tianity was the beginning of that recognition of the 
 Gospel as the religion of his people which since his 
 days no European sovereign has ventured to regard 
 as the ground of his claim to rule. If in any real 
 sense he was a Christian at all, if his daily life was 
 in hideous contrast to the creed he professed, and 
 his career was a hideous reproach upon the religion 
 which he called his own — so much the worse for 
 him, wc may perhaps be inclined to say. But he 
 was not the first, nor by any means the last, whom 
 God has used to work out His divine purposes and,
 
 21 8 THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 
 
 in spite of themselves, their errors, or their crimes, 
 to assist in the evokition of the Kingdom of Heaven.^ 
 
 [In writing about Prankish history I adhere to 
 the French way of spelhng proper names. I do 
 so for more reasons than one, but especially for 
 this reason— that it is the simplest way of escaping 
 from the chaotic orthography (?) which modern 
 writers with Germanic tendencies seem to flounder 
 about in. M. Fustel gives a dozen forms of the 
 name " Clovis," and Guizot almost as many of the 
 name "Clotilda," for which authorities may be 
 adduced. Romans and Teutons were sorely puzzled 
 to spell the Celtic names phonetically.] 
 
 ' This Essay was written and ready for the press before 
 the magnificent monograph on Clovis by Professor Kurth, of 
 Liege, came under my notice. This book, pubhshed by 
 Mame at Tours in 1896, was issued as a memorial volume— 
 " consacre . . . au glorieux aiiniversaire du Baplhne dc Reims 
 qui a fait de la France, it y a qiiatorze cent ans, la fille ainee de 
 rEglise."— In all respects it is a book worthy of the occasion.
 
 PART II 
 
 MISCELLANEA 
 DAVID AND JONATHAN
 
 DAVID AND JONATHAN 
 
 TWO or three times in my life have I kept a 
 tortoise. No! That is an exaggeration. I have 
 never succeeded in keeping one ; he never would stay. 
 He crawled about fitfully, for the most part hiding 
 himself from human eyes, till the autumn drew on ; 
 then he vanished and never appeared again. The 
 last tortoise I had I bought out of a large tray of 
 tortoises in Croton market. He was a fraud. I put 
 him in my garden, and he was no more seen — not 
 a vestige of him ever turned up again. Yet it was 
 in the month of June, when, if ever, tortoises ought 
 to be lively and gay. I suppose he was too gay, 
 and finding himself at liberty he started upon his 
 WandcYJahr, and continued roaming till he fell 
 asleep, famished and lonely. I had arrived at the 
 conviction that, as a class, tortoises were uninterest- 
 ing creatures, when, as summer was fainting away 
 in the arms of autumn this year, I went to visit my 
 kinsfolk in Devon, and lo ! to my unspeakable
 
 222 DAVID AND JONATHAN 
 
 amazement, I made the acquaintance of a tortoise 
 who answered to his name and who came when he 
 was called. 
 
 Life is full of mysteries, but among the most 
 unfathomable of those mysteries is the strange 
 pow'er that some men have over the lower animals. 
 Have I not seen with my own eyes a lumbering, 
 coarse lout of eighteen, whom all the laws on the 
 Statute Book could not deter from rambling in the 
 copses by day and poaching obstinately by night — 
 have I not seen him with a full-grown stoat in his 
 breeches pocket, which he handled as carelessly as 
 if it had been a bunch of tow ! I would not have 
 had that stoat in my breeches pockets for ten 
 minutes at the price of one thousand pounds 
 sterling. The fierce little devil would have bur- 
 rowed into my bowels in live seconds and left me 
 a mangled corpse. Yet " the varmint," as his owner 
 called him, was on terms of the most affectionate 
 intimacy with this lout of a lad, though the acquaint- 
 ance between the two was not of a week's standing. 
 But I never heard of or saw a tame tortoise till the 
 other day, and his name is David. 
 
 The Lady Laura is my cousin, and if I choose to 
 give her brevet rank who shall hinder me ? She is 
 sweet to look at, gentle and good — the very ideal of 
 what an English lady should be, " She must have
 
 DA VID AND JON A THAN 223 
 
 been very lovely sixty years ago," said one to me, 
 and I made reply, " She couldn't have been as 
 beautiful as now ! " All her life she has been a 
 tamer of birds and dogs and horses, and it has all 
 been effected by infinite gentleness, infinite patience, 
 an almost entire absence of fear, perfect health and 
 a full measure of physical strength and brain power, 
 a vivacious manner, and a temper always under 
 control ; if, indeed, it could be conceived that she 
 ever " lost her temper," as the phrase is, or ever 
 discovered that she had one. 
 
 The Lady Laura lives in a cottage, with a garden 
 in front of the house and another behind ; and 
 with her live her daughter and her servants. They 
 form a quiet, happy household, and they find their 
 joy in the round of their domestic duties. It is 
 a life which may be called Idyllic. Five years ago 
 David appeared upon the scene. He was young 
 then, very inexperienced, and of small proportions — 
 say, four inches across. The Lady Laura resolved 
 she would win his confidence, improve his manners, 
 develop his intellect, and give him a first-rate 
 education. Every day during that first summer he 
 was looked after, and not allowed to go his own 
 way. Half a dozen times every morning he was 
 called by his name and bribed with a lettuce-leaf or 
 some other favourite vegetable. In the midst of
 
 224 DAVID AND JONATHAN 
 
 a meal he had his food taken from him and only 
 restored when he moved in answer to the sound of 
 his name. As the summer began to wane David 
 had begun to exhibit some intelligence ; at any rate, 
 to this extent — that as the noontide was drawing on 
 he would appear at the drawing-room windows 
 waiting for his lettuce, and feebly notice the Lady 
 Laura only, stolidly hiding his diminished head 
 when any one else ventured to address him with 
 unbecoming familiarity. In October he ceased to 
 feed, and began to hide himself. Then he set 
 himself to burrow, slowly working away as a mole 
 does, until he had gone below stairs, as you may 
 say ; and being covered over with soil, and ap- 
 parently nothing else, he fell asleep and woke no 
 more, and never came to any call. In April next 
 year he appeared one sunny morning at his old 
 place quietly waiting. His mistress opened the 
 windows softly and called the creature loudly by his 
 name. David put forth his head, looked out, peered 
 round, and seemed to be asking for food. It was 
 evident that he had not forgotten his name. After 
 this the second year's training began. Before the 
 second summer was ended David not only came 
 whenever his name was called, but he had begun to 
 exhibit something like personal attachment for his 
 mistresS; and to follow her about the garden.
 
 DAVID AND JONATHAN 225 
 
 Before the second summer was ended he was 
 looked upon as having arrived at years of discretion, 
 and they gave him his Hberty without watching him 
 as much as heretofore. Next year his education 
 appeared to be complete. He would frequently 
 wander into the drawing-room, climbing queerly 
 over the sill of the French windows, and usually 
 finding his way to his mistress's feet, who was never 
 tired of calling him David. It was clear that the 
 sound of her voice exercised a certain fascination 
 upon him ; it was pleasant music to his rudimentary 
 ears. 
 
 But people will be so officious ! One day a well- 
 meaning person brought a second tortoise as an 
 offering to the Lady Laura, and as it was a four- 
 footed thing, and so incapable of talking nonsense 
 or gossip, it was accepted as a welcome accession 
 to the small menagerie. Of course, it was turned 
 loose in the front garden. What do you suppose 
 was the effect upon David ? David ran away ! 
 
 It was in the dog days. There could be no 
 thought of David burying himself at such a time. 
 Moreover, he had increased so much in bulk that he 
 was more than double the size he had been when 
 first he appeared on the scene ; he could not so 
 easily be hidden now. But he had run away. 
 There could be no doubt about it. There was 
 
 16
 
 226 DAVID AND JONATHAN 
 
 sadness and lamentation, and much calling for 
 David, but David had run away. Later in the 
 evening, as the sun was going down, a young man 
 from the village, five hundred yards off, brought the 
 tidings that the truant might be recovered and 
 brought back by any one who had the courage to 
 pick him up and carry him off ; as for himself, he 
 had a superstitious horror of poisonous reptiles, 
 and touch him he would not, " if it was ever so." 
 
 David was restored to the bosom of his family ! 
 But next morning there came a new surprise. The 
 second tortoise had been promptly named Jonathan, 
 in the confident hope that a firm friendship would 
 be cemented between the two Chersians, and David 
 and Jonathan were introduced to one another in 
 form. Then Jonathan slowly walked off, and David 
 followed him. I regret to say that he hissed at the 
 interloper ; he positively jeered at him, as who 
 should say, " What have I to do with thee ? " 
 
 An hour later there were strange sounds, as of 
 one tapping at a nail. They went out to see what 
 it was all about, and lo ! there was David pounding 
 at Jonathan after a fashion which few human eyes 
 have seen in this island. Jonathan was far the 
 smaller and weaker of the two, and David was 
 evidently bent on driving him off the premises. It 
 was a deadly fight, and there could be little doubt
 
 DAVID AND JONATHAN 227 
 
 as to what the issue would be. David had a method 
 of his own. He got himself abreast of his smaller 
 rival, then with a sort of a spring — think of a 
 jumping tortoise ! — he drew in his head, and at the 
 same moment butted fiercely at little Jonathan with 
 a bang, doing his best to turn him over, but only 
 succeeding in dreadfully shaking his interior. In 
 a minute or so came a second assault, and then 
 a third, and how it would have ended none can 
 say, for at this point the mistress of the garden 
 intervened, and the battle was brought to a close. 
 
 Since that day David and Jonathan have managed 
 to Hve together with only an occasional fight. But 
 they are not friends. No ! they are not friends. 
 Jonathan seems to be a stupid tortoise ; will not 
 answer to his name, is timid, solitary in his habits, 
 accepts the lower position which alone he is able to 
 occupy ; he never presumes to creep up into the 
 drawing-room frequented by David when the whim 
 takes him, and he keeps away from the favourite 
 haunt of his superior congener. In fact, he is sad 
 and cowed. But even Jonathan is beginning to 
 exhibit signs of a kind of embryonic intelligence. 
 He is young and inexperienced as yet ; but my 
 gentle cousin will tame him too some day. Even 
 he will come to her at last, for she is loo patient 
 and too fascinating to be other than irresistible.
 
 228 DAVID AND JONATHAN 
 
 Nevertheless, I have some misgivings ; I cannot but 
 think that Jonathan is not a name to which even an 
 inteUigent tortoise would ever respond with alacrity. 
 It is a dull and deadening sound to most ears, like 
 the boom of a big cannon. Whereas those sharp 
 dentals, one at the beginning the other at the end of 
 *' David," would appeal to the tympanum of any 
 living thing that has the ghost of an ear. Whether 
 a tortoise has a tympanum I am not, however, in 
 a position to decide.
 
 ADAM AND EVE
 
 ADAM AND EVE 
 
 IN the Illustrated Loudon News of November 20, 
 1894, there appeared a certain frivolous paper 
 upon the life and doings of two happy tortoises that 
 had been living for a few years under the benign 
 influences which a gracious kinswoman of mine is 
 wont to shed upon all things animate and inanimate 
 that bask in the sunshine of her smile. It is not to 
 report upon these two favoured creatures that I write 
 to-day — they are alive and well, thank you ; but I 
 have a Httle lost my interest in them, my pride in 
 them, in fact. If I may use a vulgar expression, I 
 will venture to say that the noses of these tortoises 
 of the Lady Laura have been put out of joint of late. 
 I have come into relation with other tortoises that 
 are more noticeable than they. First and foremost, 
 1 have discovered that the city of Norwich is famous 
 for tortoises, and deserves to be more famous still by 
 reason of their being able to boast of a very accom- 
 plished historiographer, who has written more 
 
 231
 
 232 ADAM AND EVE 
 
 intelligently and more gracefully about these animals 
 than any naturalist ever wrote before. Sir Peter 
 Eade is a physician and a man of science, and has 
 been a keeper of tortoises thirteen years and more. 
 He weighs them, he watches them, he feeds them, 
 he appeals to their intellects, to their memory of 
 the past, to their hopes of the future ; but he finds 
 them deaf to his voice, charm he never so wisely. 
 The worst of it, however, is that he has arrived at 
 the belief that his two tortoises are both males, each 
 pursuing his monotonous celibate life, and each 
 avoiding to some extent the society of the other. 
 I suspect that they are moody> disappointed animals, 
 that one would slay the other if there were a lettuce 
 to gain by the crime, and that no love is lost between 
 them. I -know not what their names are, but I 
 know what they ought to be called. Clearly they 
 should be known among tortoises as Cain and Abel. 
 One of them, indeed, shows a marked preference to 
 slices of apple— hence the suggestion of his name ; 
 the other, just because his brother prefers that fruit, 
 turns away from it with marks of displeasure. This 
 brother must be Cain. These tortoises are ambitious 
 tortoises. Sir Peter tells how when green peas are 
 in season, Cain and Abel make violent efforts to 
 climb up his trousers to get at the green peas in his 
 pockets. Nay 1 that even without any thought of
 
 ADAM AND EVE ix-x 
 
 -)0 
 
 satisfying the cravings of his maw, one of them has 
 been known to try and cHmb a tree — or something 
 hke it — only to get nearer the sun in the heavens. 
 Both are moody and rageful when the clouds come 
 and darken the heavens with their gloom. The 
 larger of these brethren, is, however, but a poor 
 Httle object — in 1892 he weighed no more than 
 3 lbs. 3^ oz. — and when he does not thrive, may- 
 hap he is pining for he knows not what. He has a 
 heart brimful of love to give away, and none comes 
 to claim it. Poor, desolate Abel 1 
 
 In that same city of Norwich, however, there is 
 another tortoise, who may well be called Methuselah. 
 He is said to be " an old inhabitant of this city." 
 He is known to have lived there for at least thirty 
 years. He shows no signs of infirmity, and he 
 weighs 6^ lbs. The hermit life seems to suit him, 
 and all I have to say of him is that his life has been 
 virtuous, his tastes innocent, and his deportment 
 grave, not to say sanctimonious — a good specimen, 
 in short, of what an anchorite ought to be : frugal 
 in his diet, seldom smiling, never violent. 
 
 Within the last week or so I have had the privilege 
 of being introduced to a happy wedded pair of 
 tortoises who exhibit all the signs of perfect con- 
 nubial felicity. In the year 1845 they were pre- 
 sented to Miss Biddell, of Ipswich, and under her
 
 234 ADAM AND EVE 
 
 fostering care they have remained for fifty years and 
 more, pursuing the even tenor of their way and fondly 
 attached to one another. In the year 1895 they kept 
 their golden wedding, and they have been fed as 
 much as possible during the summer upon rose- 
 leaves, which they dearly love, to impress upon their 
 memories the fact which they seem to be only half 
 alive to— namely, that for half a century they have 
 been united in matrimony, and never had an angry 
 word! The Dunmow flitch ought to be awarded 
 them. Do they not deserve it? Of course their names 
 are, respectively, Adam and Eve. Eve is portly and 
 dignified, but she has not nearly attained to the 
 dimensions— nor probably to the years— of the 
 Norwich Methuselah : she weighed but 5 lbs. 
 the other day. Adam is, to my mind, a plebeian 
 tortoise. I suspect something like a low marriage 
 must be laid to the charge of Eve. She is comely ; 
 he is coarse. But their union has been blessed 
 with offspring. No ! not quite that, but with the 
 hope and promise of offspring. Eve has had eggs, 
 and this year she laid five of them. But — so much 
 the worse for the heartlessness of human creatures — 
 not one has been allowed to be sat upon. All those 
 eggs were blown ! They are pearly white — very 
 thick and hard in the shell, very brittle, round, and 
 about the size of a wood-pigeon's egg. When Eve
 
 ADAM AND EVE 235 
 
 lays an egg she turns her back upon it, and rapidly 
 kicks earth over it with her hind feet ; then she 
 walks off demurely, and apparently forgets all about 
 it, for, as often as not, she deposits the next egg 
 somewhere else in the garden and forgets that too. 
 Both these creatures know their mistress well, and 
 come at call of her voice. Both are believed to be 
 at least sixty years old, for they were not young 
 fifty years ago. Their habits are precisely such as 
 have been described before. They butt one another ; 
 they have their little preferences for different plants, 
 though they will leave everything else for rose- 
 leaves ; they bask in the sun ; they think life in 
 winter not worth living, and so they wisely go to 
 sleep, as many of us would do if we could. When 
 they drop off into torpidity — which, observe, is a 
 higher region of existence than stupidity — then 
 their kind mistress puts them in a box, covers them 
 over with dry sand, takes them to their own apart- 
 ment in her comfortable house, and leaves them till 
 the spring is well advanced and they begin to move 
 again. Then their slow pulses resume their languid 
 throbs once more, and they are turned out into that 
 garden again, which is to them the Garden of Eden. 
 They climb up the steps to the drawing-room some- 
 times, and then amuse themselves by enacting a 
 little drama of their own, which consists of bur-
 
 236 ADAM AND EVE 
 
 rowing under the carpet, conscious that to do so is 
 wrong, but sure at the same time that what is wrong 
 is pleasant. Observe that even among the dreamy 
 tortoises the behef is prevalent that Paradise with- 
 out the excitement of disobedience would lose some 
 of its charm.
 
 CU CU !
 
 CU CU! 
 
 " Am I your bird ? I mean to shift my bush,"— Taming of 
 THE Shrew, 
 
 I HAVE lately learnt a new fact about the Cu Cu : 
 I am seriously assured that he is a bird of ill- 
 omen. I was visiting Maria Games, struck down 
 with somewhat serious symptoms. Her aunt was 
 sitting by the bedside. Twenty yards or so from 
 the window stands an old ash with a dead branch, 
 looking gaunt and forbidding. Suddenly the familiar 
 voice greeted us— " Cu Cu ! Cu Cu ! Cu Cu !" I 
 went to the window, looked out, and saw the bird 
 moving about in its restless way, calling and calling, 
 again and again ; then away it flew, its voice seeming 
 to gather strength in its flight till it disappeared from 
 the view. When I turned round from the window 
 I saw Aunt Jane with botii hands up to her ears. 
 " Has he stopped, sir ? " I nodded. Then she took 
 her hands down. " Oh, sir 1 I can't abear tliat 
 
 J39
 
 240 CU CU.' 
 
 bird !" She looked scared and mysterious. She 
 followed me downstairs to the door. " I doubt we 
 shall never keep our M'roiah ! My husband is 
 quite upset wi' it ; he says he'd like to borrow a 
 gun ; he can't abear it neither. Two years ago that 
 bird came just in the same way, and then father 
 died ; and last year that came again, and my baby 
 died ; and now it's always here, and you may 
 depend M'roiah 'II go next. Some folks call him 
 the coffin bird, and I'm thinking they're right, sir — 
 I can't abear it ! " 
 
 Hereupon I laughed lightly. " Afraid of a Cu Cu ? 
 Why, he's only crowing. He is only calling to the 
 other Cu Cus to come and fight him if they dare. 
 That sort of bird is a poor, forlorn sort of a thing. 
 There are half a dozen cocks for every hen, and so 
 the cocks won't let the hen have a house of her 
 own, and they hunt her about, and they never give 
 her a chance of bringing up her family as decent 
 mothers should. But as to coffins, pooh ! They 
 know nothing about cofiins ; unless you mean that 
 *Cu Cu r sounds like a cough." 
 
 Aunt Jane was more than incredulous ; she was 
 irritated by my scepticism. Then, in a vain attempt 
 to comfort her, I told her how, a year ago, I was 
 driving on a certain road, and checked my horse as 
 we were going up a hill, when, lo ! almost within
 
 CU CUf 241 
 
 reach of my whip a Cu Cu ht upon the fence and 
 called to me as I passed, and I told her how it 
 followed me for some minutes, passing and lighting 
 on the rails, and staring at me quite close, and, as it 
 were, talking to me, till I pulled up to look more 
 closely at it, and then it flew away. The good 
 woman was awestruck. " What, on dead wood, 
 sir f " " Dead wood ! Why, it was a rotten old 
 post and rail fence." "Wasn't you afraid, sir?" 
 No, I was not afraid, and no harm came to me, and 
 I wished I could see that Cu Cu again. As for 
 killing the poor bird, let her tell her husband from 
 me that mischief would be sure to come of that. 
 Certain sure. I wouldn't have the man to kill a 
 Cu Cu, I wouldn't. Let him be warned in time ! 
 I believe and hope that I have saved that Cu Cu's 
 life for once. You don't know how solemnly I can 
 speak when I try. But has any one else ever heard 
 of the coffin bird? And is the funereal character 
 which this name seems to have given him to be 
 accounted for by his being called in some places 
 the coughing bird ? The name and the ill-omens 
 attached to his appearance are, at any rate, quite 
 new to me ! 
 
 I am afraid my poor jackdaws have sulTcred very 
 
 >7 
 
 '
 
 242 CU CU! 
 
 severely this winter. I have not seen one wheeling 
 round the church-tower this spring ; and I cannot 
 account for the fact that never once during the hard 
 winter did a single jackdaw come down to our 
 feeding-ground. But our thrushes and blackbirds 
 are quite multitudinous, and I am sure they ought 
 to be, for the bushels of provender that have been 
 provided for them in various forms are past telling. 
 A great neighbour of mine was lamenting the other 
 day that hardly a thrush was to be seen in his park. 
 " How often did they feed them ? " " Never missed 
 a day," was the reply. " Every day after breakfast." 
 Alas 1 woe to the bird that has one meal a day, and 
 only one, when the snow is eighteen inches deep on 
 the ground and the thermometer below zero 1 Fancy 
 you and me being satisfied with afternoon tea — one 
 cup, with two pieces of thin bread and butter — to 
 keep body and soul together for four-and-twenty 
 hours, and that liberal fare being all we had to 
 depend upon for two months together ! The terrible 
 discipline of the monks of La Trappe would be 
 luxurious gluttony compared with that. But how 
 many days should we last ? Try it, my robust 
 brothers, and advertise yourselves for exhibition at 
 the Royal Aquarium as miracles of prolonged 
 abstinence 1 We were very proud indeed to hear 
 of a little damsel's lament as she passed our gate
 
 CU CU! 243 
 
 in that dreadful January, and saw the crowd of 
 blackbirds gobbling up their supper : " Oh, mother, 
 why can't we have such fat birds as the lady shepherd 
 has ? " Are the little darlings grateful ? I am afraid 
 I must answer, " Not a bit of it." They no more trust 
 me than if I were a tom cat. Though the thrushes 
 have been building in the yew-hedges close by the 
 front door, yet the first brood, of four, has cleared 
 out without saying a word of thank you or good- 
 bye. Between the lower nature and the higher 
 there is apt to be a great gulf fixed ; the two have 
 so little in common. Moreover, taking man in the 
 concrete, I often doubt where the higher nature is 
 to be found. Looking back upon the ages of pillage 
 and slaughter — and slave-hunting, for has there not 
 been enough and to spare of that, too ? — what has 
 man done to the birds that they should trust us ? 
 I have lost irretrievably, and quite undeservedly, the 
 confidence even of my sweet-voiced canary. It is 
 enough to make any man sad at heart to think 
 about it. There was a time when he would come 
 and take a hemp-seed from between my lips, and 
 a primrose from my fingers. But these are things 
 of the past. One day, two summers ago, the door 
 of his cage and the window were both left open, and 
 he vanislied. What weeping tiicre would have been 
 if there had been children in the house 1 As it was.
 
 244 CU CU! 
 
 we were only very silent — a little gulpy, and curiously 
 disinclined to look one another in the face. Eight- 
 and-forty hours later came hopeful tidings. One of 
 our cottagers two miles off had captured a " yaller 
 sparrer," and had got it in a basket. 
 
 It was eventide, but a horse was harnessed and 
 a man sent for it with the dog-cart, and a cage with 
 him, and in half an hour back came our little Pippi, 
 only just alive, and unable to stand. The man had 
 seen the poor bird, who had taken refuge in a barn, 
 faint and frightened of course, and in the excitement 
 of the chase had put his big-booted foot upon the 
 poor thing, and so secured his prey. We did what 
 we could, but he has only one foot left, and that has 
 no more than three claws, one behind and two in 
 front. You see I spare you technicalities, but the 
 other leg is footless and sadly maimed. Well ! well I 
 That's nearly two years ago, and as I write he is 
 singing his old gentle song — that bird never screamed 
 a scream in his life — and he must be happy after a 
 fashion, for he sings from morn to dewy eve, but he 
 has never trusted me since that sad occurrence with 
 the outer world and that enlarged experience of man 
 and his ways. He bids me good morning regularly ; 
 sometimes he speaks to me with an air of half- 
 forgiving tolerance ; but he cannot forget that I am 
 human, and in his heart of hearts I verily believe he
 
 CU CU ! 
 
 24: 
 
 thinks, and cannot get rid of the conviction, that I 
 set that shepherd to tread upon him ; and let me 
 and mine say what we will, his opinion is that all 
 men are alike — some a good deal worse, but none 
 much better than beasts of prey.
 
 MOLES 
 
 I
 
 MOLES 
 
 I AM the man who hath seen a mole's eye 
 guttering at him ! Yes ! It was on a day 
 when we were on a roaming ramble in Rox- 
 burghshire, and sauntering about somewhere near 
 Melrose. As we were peering about in a pleasant 
 shady something or other, lo ! I saw a mighty 
 Scotchman plucking away from a moving piece of 
 earth a tiny little human creature, dangerously full 
 of curiosity, who was burning with a desire to 
 find out what that diminutive earthquake meant. 
 " Coom awa' ! coom awa' ! " said the big giant 
 [N.B. I do not pretend to be able to transliterate 
 that barbaric dialect, the writing of which some 
 deluded ones regard as a beautiful though difficult 
 accomplishment]. " Coom awa' ! Et'll bite ye!" 
 I made a grab at the embryo earthquake and 
 clutched a baby mole 1 The giant, with all the 
 signs of hysterical terror, started back, plucking the 
 
 child from the impending perils that loomed so 
 
 349
 
 250 MOLES 
 
 horribly near ; but when he saw that I had the lovely 
 little mole in my hand and was examining it 
 minutely, was just a little reassured, and even bent 
 over to look. " Ah ! weel noo ! " said the giant in 
 his barbaric and raucous form of speech, " es et 
 verry ferocious ? " I said " No," and I showed him 
 the strange little animal, clothed in a beautiful silver 
 grey satin. The orbit of its eye had not yet closed 
 up, as the learned tell me it does soon after the 
 young mole is born, and there was the bright little 
 eye exposed to mine and glittering with a quite 
 indescribable glitter as I gazed. Whether there 
 was any " speculation in those orbs " I will not 
 undertake to say, but I feasted on the strange sight, 
 which I suspect hardly one man in a hundred thou- 
 sand in Great Britain has seen; and, having finished 
 with this atom of subterraneous hfe, I gently laid it 
 down in the centre of the earthquake, watched it 
 give a sly little wriggle, and bestowed upon it my 
 blessing, thanking the powers that be that I was not 
 a " collector," and that I did not go about slaying 
 things to put their shrivelled carcasses in a glass 
 case, and gloat over my skill in lessening the sum 
 total of animal life, which I like to think has its 
 rich abundance of enjoyment while it lasts. Why 
 should we murder the poor moles ? Why should 
 we sanction the murder of them ? Why should
 
 MOLES 251 
 
 we not protest against their being massacred 
 wholesale ? 
 
 When I was a child, my nurse used to make my 
 flesh creep by threatening me, when I was naughty, 
 that I should be "put in the bury-hole and be dug 
 up by the resurrection man, and have my teeth sold 
 to the dentist, to make sets of 'em for the fine 
 ladies ! " To be dug up by " a resurrection man " 
 was no uncommon thing in those days, or at any 
 rate it had been common enough not very long 
 before I was born, as a recent writer on this grue- 
 some subject has shown. Of course a resurrection 
 man was to my childish imagination the most grim 
 of all conceivable ogres ; but when it came to such 
 frightful details of anticipation, as one may say, and 
 I had to imagine the extraction of my teeth from 
 my young jaw for trade purposes, and w^as moreover 
 left quite uncertain as to whether this diabolical and 
 ultra-diabolical operation would be performed upon 
 me alive or dead, can you wonder if I got to regard 
 a resurrection man as a very prince of demons — an 
 unearthly because an unearthing demon who would 
 stop at nothing ? But, when we come to reflect 
 upon his crimes, is not a mole-catcher worse — very 
 much worse — than the old-fashioned resurrection 
 man ? The old culprit at any rate waited to 
 operate upon the buried dead : he waited till his
 
 252 MOLES 
 
 victim was cold in his grave. The other traps the 
 hving and catches him in his infernally contrived 
 snares when he is " all alive, oh ! " ; has no pity, 
 no shame, no remorse, and, w^hen all is said and 
 done, makes a contemptibly small profit by his 
 trade of murder. 
 
 The district in which I pass my lowly life is just 
 now suffering for its sins in the way of mole-slaying, 
 by the natural operation of those Divine laws, which 
 grind slowly, though they grind exceeding small. 
 There is a deeply-rooted superstition prevalent 
 among the peasantry that moles are only mischie- 
 vous and destructive vermin. Nay, there is a little 
 bunch or collection of idle superstitions acting to 
 the discredit of the moles — for instance, that they 
 bring rain when it is not wanted ; that they haunt 
 the churchyards and prey upon our forefathers ; 
 that they cause tremendous floods by burrowing 
 through great embankments that keep back the sea 
 from lands that, but for those banks, would be 
 submerged ; that their earth putts (such is the pro- 
 nunciation of that obscure expression) are poisonous 
 to the soil around them ; and other such slanderous 
 and malignant accusations. P'or there were days 
 when men believed in the devil very much more 
 firmly, and, I may add, more intelligently and 
 practically, than they believed in the Heavenly
 
 MOLES 253 
 
 Father ; when evil was far, far more present with 
 them than good ; when " bUght and famine, plague 
 and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands " 
 were brought home to them with much more 
 aggressive and unceasing menace and mischief than 
 those gracious and beneficent forces which help to 
 rid us of these manifestations of the malignity of 
 matter ; times when Nature was so tyrannous and 
 man so weak, when the evil one was always haunt- 
 ing their infantine imaginations, and when goodness 
 was so very far away, had to be waited for so long, 
 to be hoped for against hope, and was so very rare 
 and so hard to find out — in those days men found 
 that the easiest explanation of everything that hap- 
 pened to them was to say the devil did it. Every- 
 thing that brought pain and loss and ruin came 
 from the goblins that were grubbing and growling 
 in the bowels of the cruel earth, where Hate was 
 king, restless for ever I 
 
 Meanwhile the best way to escape his ire 
 Was not to seem too happy ! 
 
 So the poor little moles came in for their share of 
 the blame that attached to all the things that were ; 
 and we, the heirs of all the ages, have an heritage of 
 mischief from our distant progenitors, the gibbering
 
 254 
 
 MOLES 
 
 bipeds with their haunting fears and rudimentary 
 speech and "foreheads villanous low." 
 
 And now we are beginning to suffer for our mis- 
 bchefs. I know I speak for the unpitied. I belong 
 to the unpitied classes ; for who pities the parsons 
 in what Donne calls " the very country " ? Yet our 
 sorrows may come to extend even to you, you of the 
 breed of Dives, who fare sumptuously every day. 
 Would it be a small thing to you if you should find 
 yourselves suddenly robbed of the joy of straw- 
 berry jam ? Yet that is what we are coming to, 
 perhaps much sooner than you know. We, the 
 unpitied, have few luxuries left us, but among those 
 few are our strawberry beds. In my humble way I 
 am proud of mine. This year I had about one 
 hundred and fifty square yards of strawberry beds 
 in this garden of mine. A month ago the promise 
 of a crop was so great, and the unripe fruit so 
 splendid to look at, that I began to think I might 
 turn an honest penny by them to help to pay, per- 
 haps, a penny in the pound of my land tax. Alas ! 
 I have not had six strawberries to eat ; the whole 
 surface of the beds is one picture of devastation 
 and repulsive rottenness. They have been con- 
 sumed by millions of ground beetles, Ophoiius 
 riificorius or Picristochiis vulgaris ; it makes the 
 smallest possible difference to me which, but some
 
 MOLES 255 
 
 people do dearly love long names. These beetles 
 are in my garden as common as dirt ; they are 
 winged things ; they burrow in the ground, and 
 there, it is said, they propagate their detestable 
 progeny in the day time ; in the night season they 
 come up from their lairs and cover the surface of 
 the beds till the foliage is overspread with them as 
 by a quivering pall. Bring a lantern, and lo 1 they 
 scuttle away. The fiends have one remnant of 
 virtue left to them : they know what a guilty shame 
 means. Creeping things they are not, for they run 
 muiaiis mutandis with the speed of antelopes when 
 disturbed. "The land is as the Garden of Eden 
 before them ; behind them a desolate wilderness." 
 Already in this district men have begun to call them 
 locusts. This, to us, terrible scourge has come upon 
 us as a veritable visitation. The market gardeners 
 are walking about with tears in their eyes. Some 
 sanguine optimists are suggesting that the Lord 
 Mayor — I mean the Lord Mayor — should at once 
 set on foot a public subscription for all sufferers 
 from the plague — except only the country parsons. 
 Some politicians suggest that we should move for 
 a commission of inquiry. One man — you need not 
 ask who — wrote up straight to the Royal Agricul- 
 tural Society, and received by return of post a very 
 interesting pamphlet, affording a vast deal of infor-
 
 256 MOLES 
 
 matioii oil the subject of ground beetles in general 
 and of these beetles in particular, by Mr. Cecil 
 Warburton, which will delight the curious ; but 
 when it comes to deal with the remedies, alas ! 
 there are none that the gifted author of the pamphlet 
 believes in. The real fact is that these "locusts" 
 are by nature carnivorous, and have suddenly given 
 up eating other pests like themselves because they 
 have increased so enormously upon their prey that 
 they have been driven to devour fruits and even 
 flowers now that they cannot find such flesh meat 
 as they would dine upon if it were there. But there 
 is another melancholy fact concerning them, and 
 that is that these ground beetles, who have begun to 
 eat up the fruits of the soil, and who by and by will 
 return to their carnivorous habits by feeding upon 
 babies in their cradles and the two-year-old little 
 toddlers in their perambulators, have gone on in- 
 creasing at an awful and inconceivable rate of 
 geometrical progression, because their natural 
 enemies, the moles, have been for a long time in 
 this district undergoing a process of extermina- 
 tion ; and what is to be the end of it all none can 
 say. 
 
 And this brings me back to my moles. A mole 
 is one of the most interesting and instructive of 
 animals, if only you take the trouble to study him.
 
 MOLES 257 
 
 We have had delightful monographs on the frog, on 
 the crayfish, on the common domestic fly ; but I 
 know no satisfactory bookling on the mole. May I 
 suggest that some gifted naturalist should set to 
 work upon this subject and witch the world with 
 the tale that he might unfold ? There are those who 
 assure us that the mole is a survival of the mega- 
 therium, and that he is the only living thing which 
 still possesses a peculiarly formed ^//^d^r on his broad 
 hand, the only known analogue of a similar toe on 
 the hind foot of the extinct glyptodon. Also it is 
 certain that, though the mole has no external ears, 
 yet no animal that we are familiar with has such 
 exquisite sense of hearing. His sense of touch 
 seems to be diffused over all the surface of his little 
 body, and some of the learned assure us that 
 those little eyes, which in the full-grown animal 
 are hard to find, are furnished with a certain 
 muscle which can be contracted or expanded at 
 will, insomuch that your mole may just keep 
 his eyes open or closed, according to circum- 
 stances — an invaluable accomplishment, such as 
 courtiers, diplomatists, ei hoc genus onine may be 
 forgiven if, when they hear of, they too desire 
 to have. 
 
 Then there are those marvellous fortresses, habi- 
 tations, hunting-grounds, and the rest which the 
 
 18
 
 258 MOLES 
 
 moles construct, and about which it is not my pro- 
 vince to speak — the domed citadel, the tortuous 
 galleries, the dormitory, the magazines of food, and 
 the wells or reservoirs of water — yes, actually wells ! 
 — that they dig ; and then the romance of their 
 lives 1 their loves and wars and bloody battles, 
 with the plentiful banquet and repast when the 
 conqueror comes home, and where Mrs. Mole 
 receives her lord to four o'clock tea (some seri- 
 ously insist that literally and punctually it is always 
 at four o'clock), though, instead of muffins, there 
 is a plate of skinned earthworms provided for 
 her dainty lord — only as a treat, though ! only as 
 a treat ! 
 
 The main point to be kept in view, however, in all 
 this is that the voracity of the mole is prodigious. 
 The number of wireworms found in a mole's 
 stomach, as it has been reported to me, is almost 
 incredible. The larvae of beetles and other wild 
 beasts hostile to man and enemies to human pro- 
 gress, civilization, and culture that a hundred moles 
 would consume in a year, they say, we could count 
 by millions ; and some calculators, great in mathe- 
 matics, talk even of millions of millions. Certain it 
 it that in the present depressed condition of agricul- 
 ture it is difficult to estimate how much serious 
 mischief is being done by exterminating one of the
 
 MOLES 259 
 
 farmer's best and most influential friends — the mole. 
 To wage a stupid and ignorant war against this 
 beneficent ally of his is " to give himself away " 
 indeed. 
 
 What I want to know — speaking as a very humble 
 inquirer, speaking as a poor down-trodden sufferer, 
 speaking as an irritated Esquimaux or Greenlander 
 might speak if, to his dismay, he arrived at that 
 mountain — I forget where — on which the stunted 
 brambles grow that afford the poor wTetch his one 
 annual treat of vegetable food, which gladdens his 
 heart during his fortnight's holiday while he gorges 
 himself with whale blubber and blackberries — speak- 
 ing, I say, as that poor savage might be expected to 
 speak who should find that that mountain of joy 
 and hope had been devastated of all its stunted 
 brambles by a convulsion of nature ; what I want 
 to know, and what I suspect others will soon be 
 longing and asking eagerly to know, is, How can we 
 get back our moles ? How can we allure them 
 hither ? Can any one make it known to the moles 
 that we have hereabouts such a wealth of ground 
 beetles and wireworms as would suffice to fatten 
 whole legions of moles for years ? They shall not 
 be molested (no pun, if you please !), but treated 
 with the utmost respect and consideration ; and 
 already there is a talk of saddling the resurrection
 
 26o MOLES 
 
 man with the expense of a heav7 license duty, and 
 of bringing in a bill for the protection of our best 
 friends, the ialpidcv. The pressing difficulty now, 
 however, is how to get back those, our benefactors, 
 whom we have done our best to exterminate. 
 
 CNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.
 
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