STIPENDS OF THE CLEftGY 327
strue the Latin of the service books, and a knowledge of the
Church services, gained by years of experience, was all their
stock in trade.
With a limited training such as this, it was the fortune of many
to find themselves serving first as deacons, and then as priests in
the smaller rectories and the vicarages in town and country. The
value of many rectories made them a close preserve of the rich
or influential, but there were a large number of vicarages for
which an absentee rector required a deputy, and there were also
the subordinate positions, such as that of the stipendiary chap-
lain or the assistant priest to be filled. Thus there were plenty of
opportunities for those men, from whom not over much would
be expected, and who could not look forward to a very generous
stipend or allowances. Mr H. G. Richardson puts it clearly:
Vicars probably had a higher average annual income than the mere
stipendiary chaplains and assistant priests. A great many vicars, how-
ever, received but five or six marks and even less a year, and though
rectorial incomes ruled higher, yet there were some who must have
been very badly off, particularly if they endeavoured to dispense any
measure of hospitality in addition to meeting the various claims that
fell on an incumbent in respect of the maintenance of the church and
its services... .We cannot go far wrong if we consider the stipendiary
chaplains and assistant priests as forming the lowest-paid grade of
the body of priests and beneficed clergy. Below them come the un-
beneficed minor clergy, a little above them the perpetual vicars and
poorest rectors, and on an altogether different economic and social
plane the rectors of the really valuable churches. If, further, we
suppose the average chaplain to have had from all sources before the
Black Death an income of six or seven marks (say 90 shillings), and
accept forty-eight shillings as a moderate estimate of the income of a
first-class agricultural labourer, such as a ploughman or carter, at the
same period, we have some indication of whereabouts in the social
scale to place the great mass of poorly paid parish clergy.1
It is evident then that neither birth, training nor emoluments
was peculiarly favourable to the production of a priesthood of
outstanding merit, and the records, both historical and literary,
bear damning witness of their shortcomings. Such records as
survive of official enquiries into the intellectual state of the
village clergy are staggering. We have, for example, the visitation
1 "The Parish Clergy of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,"
Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc. Third Series, vol. vi, 1912.