62 A MEDIEVAL CITY

Rotherham was also Chancellor of England for a
time. Both Richard Scrope and William Booth,
archbishops of the century, had been lawyers. The
appointment of George Neville, who had been
nominated when only twenty-three to the see of
Exeter, was a purely political one, the bestowing
of a high and lucrative office on a member of a noble
family that was enjoying the full sunshine of popu-
larity and power. The King could also benefit from
Church positions otherwise than by presenting them
to partisans. During the two and a half years that
the see of York was kept vacant between the time
of the execution of Archbishop Scrope and the
appointment of Henry Bowett (in 1407), the revenues
went, in accordance with the established practice,
to the royal purse.

There were also " clerks," educated men, but
not priests, who were in " minor orders." Many a
man, asserting that he was a clerk, made application
for trial by an ecclesiastical court, so as to get the
benefit of the less stringent judgment of the Church
courts, to which belonged the right of dealing with
ecclesiastical offenders.

One abuse within the Church was pluralism, that
is, the holding of more than one office at the same time
with the result that the holder was drawing revenue
for work he could not himself do. William Sever,
for instance, while Abbot of St. Mary's, York, became
Bishop of Carlisle. These two high offices, one mon-
astic and the other secular, he held simultaneously
from 1495 to 1502.

The religious orders were of two kinds, viz. monks
(and nuns) who lived in seclusion in monasteries,
abbeys, or convents, and friars, who lived under a
rule but came out into the world to preach and work.
Both kinds took the vows of chastity, poverty, and