the number of 3,000 houseling persons, and a great number of youth. And the king's majesty hath all the tithes and all the profits yearly coming and growing within the same parishes,' finding two parish priests there. And the said two parish priests are not able to serve and discharge the said cures without aid and help of other priests. And further, there is no school, nor other like foundation, within the said town, nor within twenty miles of it, for the virtuous education and bringing up of youth, nor any hospital or other like foundation for the comfort and relief of the poor, of which there is an exceeding great number within the said town other than what are before mentioned, of which the said incumbents do now take the whole yearly revenues and profits, and distribute no part thereof to the aid and comfort or relief of the said poor people.

"In consideration whereof it may please the king's majesty of his most charitable benignity, moved with pity in that behalf, to convert the revenues and profits of the sum of the said promotions into some godly foundation, whereby the said poor inhabitants, daily there multiplying, may be relieved, and the youth instructed and brought up virtuously, or otherwise, according to his most godly and discreet wisdom, and the inhabitants shall daily pray to God for the prosperous preservation of his most excellent majesty, long to endure.""

This was owing to the recent dissolution of the Abbey.

2 In one case it is said: "Mem: The decay of rent is caused by the fact that most came from lands in possession of the abbey; since the dissolution these have been sold, and the purchasers do not allow that they are liable to pay." The hospital called St. Parvell's, without the south gate, also had been dissolved by Henry VIII., and the property granted to Sir George Somerset (6th July, 37 H. VIII.). It had produced £16 13s. 4d. a year, with £5 10s. "paid out of the late abbey of Bury to the sustentation of the poor." The whole charity, of course, by the dissolution of the abbey and the grant of the remaining property as above, had come to an end.

1 Ibid. (No. 44).

It is hardly necessary to say that the petition had no effect. At Bury, as indeed all over England, the claims of the sick and poor were disregarded and the money passed into the possession of the crown. The hospitals that mediæval charity had erected and supported were destroyed; the youth remained untaught; the poor were deprived of the charity which had been, as it was supposed, secured to them for ever by the wills of generations of Catholic benefactors; the poor prisoners in the jail at Bury had to go without their Sunday Mass and their winter fire; whilst the money that had hitherto supported chaplains and chantry priests to assist the parish priests in the care of their districts was taken by the crown.

For Yorkshire the certificates of the commissioners have been published by the Surtees Society. The same impression as to the utility and purpose of the chantry and other assisting priests may be gathered from almost every page. For example, the chantry of St. Katherine in the parish church of Selby: "The necessity thereof is to do divine service, and help the parish priest in time of necessity to minister sacraments and sacramentals and other divine services." For "the said parish of Selby is a great parish, having but one curate, and in the same parish is a thousand houseling people; and the said curate has no help in time of necessity but only the said chauntry priest."1

Again: "Two chantries of our Lady in the parish church of Leeds, 'founded by the parishioners there to serve in the choir and to minister sacraments and other divine service, as shall be appointed by the vicar and other honest parishioners there, which they do. . . . The necessity thereof is to do divine service, to help the curate, and minister the Sacraments, having 3,000 houseling people.

In the same parish church, the chantry of St. Mary

1 Yorkshire Chantry Surveys (Surtees Soc.), p. 213.

2 Ibid., p. 214.

Magdalene was "founded by William Evers, late vicar of Leeds, to pray for the soul of the founder and all Christian souls, to minister at the altar of St. Mary Magdalene, to keep one yearly obit, with seven shillings to be distributed, and to serve in the choir at divine service all holy days and festival days, as appears by the foundation deed thereof, dated A.D. 1524."

1

One more example may be taken out of the hundreds in these volumes: "The chantry, or donative, within the chapel of Holbecke in the parish of Leeds, 'the incumbent is used to say daily mass there and is taken for a stipendiary priest paying tithes. And there is a great river between the said parish church and the chapel, whereby they can by no means often pass to the said church. The said chantry is distant from the said parish church one mile. The necessity thereof is to do divine service according to the foundation." "2

A few words enforcing the lesson to be learned from these extracts taken from the preface to the second part of these interesting Yorkshire records may be here given. Mr. Page, the editor, says: "Up to the time of the Reformation nearly all education was maintained by the church, and when the chantries were dissolved practically the whole of the secondary education of the country would have been swept away, had not some provision for the instruction of the middle and lower classes been made by continuing, under new ordinances, some of the educational endowments which pious founders had previously provided." s

"The next most important class of foundations, some of which were continued under the commission

consisted of the chapels of ease, which were much required in extensive parishes with a scattered population, and had been generally founded by the parishioners for their own convenience. It seems, therefore, that the dissolution of these chapels was a peculiar hardship. As early as 1233, 3 Ibid., p. II.

1 Ibid., p. 215.

2 Ibid., p. 216.

the Pope granted licence to the archbishop of York to build oratories or chapels and to appoint to them priests, in places so distant from the parish churches that the people could with difficulty attend divine service, and the sick died before the priest could get to them to administer the last sacraments. The necessity for these chapels of ease was especially felt in Yorkshire, where the inhabitants of so many outlying hamlets were cut off from their parish churches in winter time by impassable roads and flooded rivers, which is the reason time after time assigned by the commissioners for the necessity of the existence of such chapels; and yet comparatively few of them were recommended for continuance by Sir Walter Mildmay and Robert Kelway in the returns to the commission. Possibly, it was the loss of the endowments of Ayton chapel which occasioned the insurrection at Leamer

which chapel the inhabitants so piously kept up afterwards at their own expense." 1

"In most cases, the chantry priest seems to have acted in much the same capacity in a parish as that now occupied by the curate; he assisted the parish priest in performing mass, hearing confessions and visiting the sick, and also helped in the ordinary services of the church; the few only were licensed to preach, like the schoolmaster at Giggleswick. In the Cathedral Church at York, besides praying for the soul of his founder and all Christian souls, each chantry priest had to be present in the choir in his habit of a parson on all principal and double feast days, Sundays, and nine lections, at Matins, Mass, Evensong, and processions, when he had to read lessons, begin anthems, and to minister at the high altar as should be appointed to him by the officers of the choir. Besides these purely ecclesiastical duties, very many of the chantry priests were bound to teach a certain number of the children of the neighbourhood, which was the origin of most of our Grammar Schools."

365

CHAPTER XIII.

PILGRIMAGES AND RELICS.

PILGRIMAGES and the honour shown to relics are frequently pointed out as, with Indulgences, among the most objectionable features of the pre-Reformation ecclesiastical system. It is assumed that on the eve of the religious changes the abuses in these matters were so patent that no voice was, or indeed could have been, raised in their defence, and it is asserted that they were swept away without regret or protest as one of the most obvious and necessary items in the general purification of the mediaval church initiated in the reign of Henry VIII. That they had indeed been tolerated at all even up to the time of their final overthrow was in part, if not entirely, due to the clergy, and in particular to the monks, who, as they derived much pecuniary benefit from encouraging such practices, did not scruple to inculcate by every means in their power the spiritual advantages to be derived from them. That the objectionable features of these so-called works of piety had long been recognised, is taken for granted, and the examinations of people suspected of entertaining Wycliffite opinions are pointed to as proof that earnest men were alive to these abuses for more than a century before religion was purified from them. As conclusive evidence of this, the names too, of Chaucer for early times, and of Erasmus for the Reform period, are given as those whose condemnation and even scornful rejection of such practices cannot be doubted. It becomes important, then, for a right understanding of the mental attitude of the people