Among the many curious anecdotes told in illustration of the gross ignorance of the higher orders of the clergy in medieval times the two following are not the least amusing: 

About the year 1330 Louis Beaumont was bishop of Durham.  He was an extremely illiterate French nobleman, so incapable of reading that he could not, although he had studied them, read the bulls announced to the people at his consecration.  During that ceremony the word “metropoliticae” occurred.  The bishop paused, and tried in vain to repeat it, and at last remarked:  “Suppose that said.”  Then he came to “enigmate,” which also puzzled him.  “By St. Louis!” he exclaimed in indignation, “it could be no gentleman who wrote that stuff!”

Our second anecdote is probably more generally known:  Andrew Forman, who was bishop of Moray and papal legate for Scotland, at an entertainment given by him at Rome to the Pope and cardinals, blundered so in his Latinity when he said grace that his Holiness and the cardinals lost their gravity.  The disconcerted bishop concluded his blessing by giving “a’ the fause carles to the de’il,” to which the company, not understanding his Scotch Latinity, said “Amen!”

When such was the condition of the bishops, it is not surprising to find that few of the ordinary priests were acquainted with even the rudiments of the Latin tongue, and they consequently mumbled over masses which they did not understand.  A rector of a parish, we are told, going to law with his parishioners about paving the church, cited these words, Paveant illi, non paveam ego, which, ascribing them to St. Peter, he thus construed:  “They are to pave the church, not I”—­and this was allowed to be good law by a judge who was himself an ecclesiastic.

We have an amusing example of the ignorance of the lower orders of churchmen during the “dark ages” in No. xii of A Hundred Mery Talys, as follows:  “The archdekyn of Essex, that had ben longe in auctorite, in a tyme of vysytacyon, whan all the prestys apperyd before hym, called aside iii. of the yonge prestys which were acusyd that th[e]y could not wel say theyr dyvyne service, and askyd of them, when they sayd mas, whether they sayd corpus meus or corpum meum.  The fyrst prest sayde that he sayd corpus meus.  The second sayd that he sayd corpum meum.  And than he asked of the thyrd how he sayde; whyche answered and sayd thus:  Sir, because it is so great a dout, and dyvers men be in dyvers opynyons, therfore, because I wolde be sure I wolde not offende, whan I come to the place I leve it clene out and say nothynge therfore.  Wherfore the bysshoppe than openly rebuked them all thre.  But dyvers that were present thought more defaut in hym, because he hym selfe beforetyme had admytted them to be prestys.”  And assuredly they were right in so thinking, and the worthy archdeacon (or bishop, as he is also styled), who had probably passed the three young men “for value received” from their fathers, should have refrained from publicly examining them afterwards.