There was a clerk’s house at Ringmer.  In the account of the beating of the bounds of the parish in Rogation week, 1683, it is recorded that at the close of the third day the procession arrived at the Crab Tree, when the people sang a psalm, and “our minister read the epistle and gospel, to request and supplicate the blessing of God upon the fruits of the earth.  Then did Mr. Richard Gunn invite all the company to the clerk’s house, where he expended at his own charge a barrell of beer, besides a plentiful supply of provisions:  and so ended our third and last day’s perambulation[24].”

[Footnote 24:  Social Life as told by Parish Registers, by T.F.  Thiselton-Dyer, p. 197.]

In his little house the clerk lived and tended his garden when he was not engaged upon his ecclesiastical duties.  He was often a married man, although those who were intending to proceed to the higher orders in the Church would naturally be celibate.  Pope Gregory, in writing to St. Augustine of Canterbury, offered no objections to the marriage of clerks.  Lyndewoode shows a preference for the unmarried clerk, but if such could not be found, a married clerk might perform his duties.  Numerous wills are in existence which show that very frequently the clerk was blest with a wife, inasmuch as he left his goods to her; and in one instance, at Hull, John Huyk, in 1514, expresses his wish to be buried beside his wife in the wedding porch of the church[25].

[Footnote 25:  Injunction by John Bishop of Norwich (1561), B. i b., quoted by Mr. Legg in The Parish Clerk’s Book, p. xlii.]

One courageous clerk’s wife did good service to her husband, who had dared to speak insultingly of the high and mighty John of Gaunt.  He held office in the church of St. Peter-the-Less, in the City of London, in 1378.  His wife was so persevering in her behests and so constant in her appeals for justice, that she won her suit and obtained her husband’s release[26].

[Footnote 26:  Riley’s Memorials of London, 1868, p. 425.]

We have the picture, then, of the mediaeval clerk in his little house nigh the church surrounded by his wife and children, or as a bachelor intent upon preferment poring over his Missal, if he did not sometimes emulate the frivolous feats of Chaucer’s “Jolly Absolon.”

At early dawn he sallied forth to perform his earliest duty of opening the church doors and ringing the day-bell.  The ringing of bells seems to have been a fairly constant employment of the clerk, though in some churches this duty was mainly performed by the sexton, but the aid of the clerk was demanded whenever it was needed.  According to the constitution of the parish clerks at Trinity Church, Coventry, made in 1462, he was ordered every day to open the church doors at 6 a.m., and deliver to the priest who sang the Trinity Mass a book and a chalice and vestment, and when Mass was finished to see that these goods of the church be