“Touching clerke-ales (which are lesser church-ales) for the better maintenance of Parish-clerks they have been used (until of late) in divers places, and there was great reason for them; for in poor country parishes, where the wages of the clerk is very small, the people thinking it unfit that the clerk should duly attend at church and lose by his office, were wont to send in Provisions, and then feast with him, and give him more liberality than their quarterly payments would amount unto in many years.  And since these have been put down, some ministers have complained unto me, that they are afraid they shall have no parish clerks for want of maintenance for them.”

Mr. Wickham Legg has investigated the subsequent history of this good Bishop Pierce, and shows how the Puritans when they were in power used this reply as a means of accusation against him, whereby they attempted to prove that “he profanely opposed the sanctification of the Lord’s Day by approving and allowing of profane wakes and revels on that day,” and was “a desperately profane, impious, and turbulent Pilate.”

It is well known that the incomes of the clergy were severely taxed by the Pope, who demanded annates or first-fruits of one year’s value on all benefices and sundry other exactions.  The poor clerk’s salary did not always escape from the rapacity of the Pope’s collectors, as the story told by Matthew Paris clearly sets forth: 

“It happened that an agent of the Pope met a petty clerk carrying water in a little vessel, with a sprinkler and some bits of bread given him for having sprinkled some holy water, and to him the deceitful Roman thus addressed himself: 

“’How much does the profits yielded to you by this church amount to in a year?’ To which the clerk, ignorant of the Roman’s cunning, replied: 

“‘To twenty shillings, I think.’

“Whereupon the agent demanded the percentage the Pope had just demanded on all ecclesiastical benefices.  And to pay that sum this poor man was compelled to hold school for many days, and by selling his books in the precincts, to drag on a half-starved life.”

This story discloses another duty which fell to the lot of the mediaeval clerk.  He was the parish schoolmaster—­at least in some cases.  The decretals of Gregory IX require that he should have enough learning in order to enable him to keep a school, and that the parishioners should send their children to him to be taught in the church.  There is not much evidence of the carrying out of this rule, but here and there we find allusions to this part of a clerk’s duties.  Inasmuch as this may have been regarded as an occupation somewhat separate from his ordinary duties as regards the church, perhaps we should not expect to find constant allusion to it.  However, Archbishop Peckham ordered, in 1280, that in the church of Bakewell and the chapels annexed to it there should be duos clericos scholasticos carefully chosen by the parishioners, from whose alms they would have to live, who should carry holy water round in the parish and chapels on Lord’s Days and festivals, and minister in divinis officiis, and on weekdays should keep school[29].  It is said that Alexander, Bishop of Coventry, in 1237, directed that there should be in country villages parish clerks who should be schoolmasters.