The Good Women of the Parish

All the women of late medieval England exerted an indirect influence on the clergy of their local church and on the parish as a unit of belonging and belief. Their actions, words, assumptions, and initiatives constituted the social fabric within which all Christians lived and through which the parish clergy had to navigate. But some women were able to exert a more direct influence on parish affairs. In the fifteenth century in particular, many women became central to the fundraising that paid for repairs to the nave of the church; the salaries of supplementary clergy; the purchase and maintenance of liturgical objects, such as books, chalices, and altar cloths; and commissions to glaziers and mural painters. This was very often organized on a collective and gendered basis, with unmarried women, wives, widows and “sisterhoods” being identified with local institutions known variously as guilds, lights, or stores.3 Their activities included hosting feasts and “ales” to raise money, and a great deal of craft and more menial labor in support of the material fixtures and fittings of the church. Many aspects of this work were thought of as an extension to domestic labor, characterized by Katherine French—the historian who has done most to elucidate this topic—as a continuum between “housekeeping and church-keeping.” This is exemplified in the late medieval didactic poem “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” in which a mother’s first piece of advice on fulfilling the duties of a wife was to “serve God and keep thy church.”4 As in their homes, women washed, stitched, cleaned, and cooked for their parish church, working in the company of other women. To “keep” therefore meant to maintain and support the church as well as to attend it.

This parochial world of women was a fundamental part of the late medieval social fabric, especially important to the vitality of churches. Parish priests would have liaised with its leading figures over the decoration and cleanliness of vestments and altar cloths and to ensure a steady supply of communion bread, bringing women close to the essential material bases of religious worship, of course, but close also to decision-making and thereby a form of authority. What Christine Peters called their “accumulated expertise” was a storehouse of practical authority that ensured the activities of the parish continued year after year.5

When the “good women of the parish” contemplated their deaths and made wills, they often included bequests to their churches, transforming household goods into the accoutrements of church services. Bedsheets, for example, might become altar cloths; gowns, vestments; tableware, liturgical vessels.6 Personally, they may have felt a certain satisfaction, piety, or pride in being able to furnish their church, but the aggregate effect was to surround the male space of the liturgy with objects that bore associations with female parishioners. In her study of high-status women in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and their relationships with reforming clerics, Maureen Miller has stressed the closeness of the connection that could be formed through crafts and gifts. Miller’s elite women embroidered elaborate vestments and chose their beneficiaries for their personal qualities and ideological affiliations. This, she argues, fostered bonds of affinity and even obligation that augmented the standing of both parties.7 Historians have not yet found a way to translate Miller’s questions and findings into the everyday religion of the later Middle Ages, but even the suggestion is intriguing: Did parish priests feel obligated in any way to the women who provided the objects—or the money to pay for them—that were central to their sacerdotal functions?

While that question cannot be fully answered here, it is worth asking for two reasons. First, doing so makes us more receptive to the evidence of female authority within the parish that we can find. Second, it helps us think about the potential and the constraints of female authority. If one thinks about the influence of women on parish churches and priests through the work that they did, two paradigms suggest themselves. On the one hand, we might see female influence everywhere (Tsing’s “ghostly appearance of power”) and write a feminist history of the recuperative sort. This is what French has done, showing that women were central to the operation of the late medieval parish. On the other hand, we are also forced to recognize the gendered character of the work that women did. They may have been indispensable, but because their position was sustained by doing work strongly gendered feminine (as a continuum of household chores), their influence would not disturb patriarchal norms. It is also possible that women engaged in the essential tasks of embroidery and laundry for the church were liable to be regarded as suspect: both trades were sometimes seen as cover for prostitution.8 This may be another example of Kandiyoti’s “patriarchal bargain,” which we also encounter in chapter 2: women finding tolerable niches and even positions of power within a male hegemony, in return for not rocking the boat.

Women Disciplining the Clergy?

There were times, however, when women did rock the boat. Parishes were not harmonious communities devoid of conflict. That is what the proponents of the “traditional religion” view of medieval Christianity believed, but they were wrong.9 Like all societies, late medieval parishes experienced conflict arising from human weakness, inequalities, malfeasance, crime, and simple disagreements, and these had to be resolved. One of the main means of dispute resolution for parishes was the church’s judicial apparatus, whose records provide much of the evidence for the remainder of this book. Primarily this means the church courts and visitations. These institutions had different purposes, with important implications for thinking about female authority within the parish. Church courts theoretically permitted anyone of any status or gender to lodge a formal accusation against an individual or to report the circulation of “public fame” about wrongdoing, while visitations—in England at least—received collective testimony from a panel of parishioners.10

Besides defending themselves when actions were brought against them, women regularly appeared before church courts as plaintiffs and witnesses. As plaintiffs, women were restricted in the grievances they could raise. While they were thought competent to bring suits relating to their own lives, such as in marriage litigation, we hardly ever see them speaking to what we might call matters of public concern.11 However, if one reads against the grain of the church court evidence, an important sphere of action emerges where women were claiming the moral authority to speak out against malpractice among the parish clergy. A particularly important category of litigation in this regard is defamation. In late medieval England the verb diffamare had several meanings. Two of these were to insult and to report a crime. Defamation as insult was defined as the false and malicious imputation of a crime, which is only a short step from defamation as the truthful imputation of a crime.12 Sometimes, people who reported crimes thus found themselves under investigation for criminal defamation, and women—who were not expected to speak authoritatively on public matters—were especially susceptible to this turning of the tables.

An archetypal example is provided by the case against Helen Akyr of Emneth in Norfolk, recorded in the court book of the dean of Wisbech in 1462.13 Akyr was alleged to have defamed John Everarde, the chaplain of Emneth, saying that he had revealed confessions made to him in church. With careful attention to the slippage between “good” and “bad” defamation we can read this as a woman’s assertion of her right publicly to correct or discipline the clergy. Ostensibly the crime at issue is defamation: Akyr has defamed Everarde, and he has reported her to the court. But for Akyr, the crime was clearly her priest’s failure to respect the secrecy of confession.14 Occasional evidence such as this shows that women as well as men could claim the moral authority to speak on behalf of the parish, about matters of public concern. But, as a woman, Helen Akyr was acutely vulnerable to challenge. She had no formal position and her gender made it easier to dismiss her evidence and turn it into an accusation against her.

What we see in such cases is potential. Because women were systematically denied formal opportunities to speak authoritatively on matters affecting the whole parish, they had to find alternative ways to make those views heard. There is nothing to suggest that Helen Akyr was an exceptional person, so my assumption is that such potential for authoritative female speech was ubiquitous. Do we find any evidence of this when we turn from church courts to the visitations that constituted laypeople’s main exposure to ecclesiastical justice? The short answer is no. Visitations in England were based on collective parish reporting. A group of between four and twelve male parishioners, usually drawn from the upper levels of peasant wealth and landholding, would report what they believed were the “things in need of correction.”15 This institutionalized version of the parish emerged in the later thirteenth century and persisted throughout the later Middle Ages. We should assume that very many more people than these few men had opinions about church property, services, and clergy and about the behavior of their fellow parishioners, but typically the only “voice” recorded in the documents is that of the male parish panel.16

The extent to which that bench of petty patriarchs reflected a wider set of concerns, and how exactly they did so, is very difficult to establish. Nevertheless female parishioners were part of the small social speech world of parish politics, so it is safe to assume a great deal of indirect female influence. The wives of parish representatives might have had a slightly stronger influence on what was reported, having the ear of their husbands and being used to hearing the business of the parish discussed. Furthermore, in those few places where, from the later fifteenth century onward, women occasionally served as churchwardens, female influence on parochial discipline may have been explicit. Churchwardens were closely involved in financial decisions affecting the whole parish, including the clergy, and women in this role would have been well placed to make an impact. However, the association of churchwardens with visitation reporting is a projection back in time of the situation that prevailed in the mid-sixteenth century. When we find wardens reporting to visitations before the Reformation, which is rare, they are dealing only with the church fabric, leaving the business of clerical and lay discipline to other (male) parish representatives.17 Again the influence of women must be seen in two ways: its potential was everywhere, but it was almost entirely stymied by institutional and cultural barriers.

The frustration we can imagine Helen Akyr feeling when her attempt to report her ill-disciplined parish priest was turned against her surely lies behind the final way in which late medieval women sought to influence their parishes. Facing gendered attacks when using the church courts and being excluded from formal parish representation at visitation, women sometimes resorted to direct action. We should assume that most direct action by women to remedy wrongs in their parishes is lost to history.18 But sometimes we can, if we read carefully, find evidence of it in visitation and church court records. There are two reasons it might appear there. First, a woman staking a claim to moral authority was often perceived to have deviated from social and gender norms, and thus clergy or neighbors might pursue a disciplinary response; that leaves us with a record. Second, women might have exploited the fact that certain actions stimulated a judicial response, as a way to press their grievances in the public sphere. Artful “misbehavior” that might ensure they had their day in court generated a written record. In the evidence that follows we see both forces at work.

Our first example comes from the dean of Salisbury’s visitation of Hungerford, Berkshire, in 1409. Here, Margery Coterell and Juliana Farman were reported to the visitor for stealing goods belonging to St. Katherine’s “light” in the parish church. This was a parish guild associated with the illumination of that particular statue or shrine, but the list of goods stolen indicates that it had broader funding responsibilities. Coterell and Farman had allegedly taken a chalice, a service book or missal, a set of priest’s clothing or vestments, three altar cloths, a superaltar (a consecrated shelf, usually made of stone), sixteen sheep, and ten marks in coin. The liturgical paraphernalia indicate that the guild was paying for a priest and was associated with its own (possible moveable) altar. The small flock of sheep and cash reserve reveal something of the guild’s financial endowment. Such an incident demanded a proportionate response: the dean referred them to the bishop of Salisbury, who excommunicated both women and requested their arrest by the Crown. This happened sometime in the following months, but by July 1410, they had been released.19

Katherine French has proposed that Coterell and Farman were wardens of the light with responsibility for these goods and that the alleged theft was in fact part of a dispute about guild management.20 This possibility is strengthened by other details in the visitation record about Juliana Farman, which suggest that she was no stranger to parochial direct action. Between 1405 and 1408, Farman was accused of an escalating series of acts that reveal a rather proprietorial attitude toward the church and its clergy. She had a pew built for her own use, which was not unusual except that this one was fixed to the floor and obstructed a doorway; she snatched from the hands of a diocesan official a mandate authorizing the marriage of a local couple; she then assaulted a chaplain after being taken to task for her failure to attend church.21 This was a woman who very much believed that it was her place to tell the clergy what to do and to resist them if they crossed her. In light of these additional pieces of information, the action by Coterell and Farman in relation to the goods of St. Katherine’s light looks more and more like a protest. We do not know exactly what their complaint was that would have led them to take the goods, and having been imprisoned for the “theft,” they may have felt they had gone too far; however, the women may have taken such direct action as their only option and would have had no control over how their actions were later presented to the visitor.

A second example illustrative of female direct action comes from the Lincolnshire village of Woolsthorpe in 1529. Robert Bekket was the vicar of Woolsthorpe, and he appeared before the bishop of Lincoln’s consistory court to answer a charge of fornication. Some of the direct speech in the charges was written down in Middle English: it was alleged that Bekket had propositioned the wife of William Tailboys, saying that “he must nede have his plesur of her” and offering her a gold coin. It was also claimed that when this woman turned him down, he asked her to fetch another female parishioner who he said was “well favored” and known to be good company. Bekket disputed the charges and, in the end, even managed to extract an apology from Tailboys’s wife (she is never named). But opinion in the parish was clearly not satisfied. Bekket’s own testimony admitted that he had been subjected to a piece of performative direct action designed to draw attention to his reputation as a sexual menace and a poor priest. Two female servants (“maidens”) of someone called Sympson “did make a babe of clowtes and they wold have cristened it as it was showed hym. And this deponent [Bekket] showed it to Sympson and said it was ill doon so to doo but he did aske no money of hym nor had noon of hym.”22

This requires some unpicking. First, we should pay close attention to the social status of those involved. A parishioner’s wife was forced to apologize and retract her allegation, but two unmarried servants took it upon themselves to take direct action against the vicar. Unmarried servants possessed less social standing than wives and may not have been believed by the court.23 This makes their resort to physical performance more understandable and more eloquent. We must then consider the nature of their action. They presented the vicar with a “babe of clowtes,” an infant doll made of rags, and asked him to baptize it. The doll represented the fruits of his untrammeled sexual aggression and the disapproval of women who believed he had behaved badly in relation to another female parishioner. In this respect it was an example of the “rough music” (admittedly rather gentle in this instance) sometimes meted out to men who had lost the respect of their neighbors.24

But because Bekket was a priest, this protest had other meanings too. It was sacramentally impossible to baptize an inanimate object, so the doll also symbolized spiritual impotence. If he had tried to christen the doll nothing would have resulted. Instructively, the phrase “no better than a man of klowetes” was current in late medieval England, meaning as useless as a scarecrow. This usage comes from a letter written by Lord John Howard in 1467 in which he recalled the insult being used against him to mean he was ineffectual and not to be feared. Similarly the Wycliffite translation of the apocryphal biblical book of Baruch cited the “man of rags,” or scarecrow, guarding a field of gourds as a metaphor for uselessness or moral impotence. It is possible that the maidens wished to communicate that an immoral priest would be unable to perform the sacraments, the lifeless doll representing his liturgical incapacity. Any implications that the priest was also impotent in body would have added to the humor of the critique. If this was their intention, they may have been influenced by Wycliffite ideas about the inefficacy of an immoral priesthood, although that connection is impossible to prove.25

Bekket’s response to the “babe of clowtes” incident was to show the offending item to the women’s master, Sympson, and tell him that their action had been unacceptable. When Bekket said that he had not given Sympson money or received any from him, he may have been trying to counter an assumption that he was bribing witnesses to his actions or being bribed himself.26 Some speculation has been necessary to interpreting this record, but the cultural resonances of the “babe of clowtes” point in a clear direction. Through such archival fragments we can catch glimpses of a hidden transcript. In the foreground, we see two men striving to recover the masculine equilibrium of a parish momentarily disturbed by female direct action. In the background we see women making claims to moral authority.

The direct action I have described here is the politics of the excluded, of people unable to influence events by formal means. It was not driven by a principled rejection of institutional dispute settlement, such as characterizes some modern instances of direct action.27 It was instead an opportunistic mode of political performance conducted at the fringes of, but in direct relation to, the institutions that governed the parish: courts and visitations. Its power arose from its capacity to represent in symbolic form what E. P. Thompson called the “known history” of particular cases: the currents of local gossip and opinion concerning particular people and events.28 Direct action by women in relation to parish governance was a performance for an audience who shared a common political space. Communication by allusion and symbolism was relatively easy, though these are features that make it harder for us to reconstruct precise meanings. By these means, as well as through their occasional, partial, and occluded participation in church courts and visitations, women were able to exert a degree of authority over the late medieval parish.

How Can We Not Talk about the Wives of Priests?

From among the general female population, some women came to know the clergy better than most and were consequently able to exert a much greater influence over them. This group comprised the short- and long-term domestic and sexual partners of priests and the servants and family members who often lived with them. Neither group was meant to exist. Priests in major orders were supposed to be celibate, and they were sometimes told to live in all-male households.29 Despite this, many women entered into close personal relationships with clergy, worked as servants in their homes, or lived with them as family members. They would continue to “haunt the church’s official story” long after the period of the Gregorian reform.30 The complex relationship between prohibition and reality is explored further in chapter 4. For now, I wish to concentrate on the women themselves. What were their lives like, and what influence did they have?

Giving due historical attention to the de facto wives of priests first involves extricating them from the sneering attitude of an older historiography that saw them as the cause of clerical moral failure and medieval “corruption.” They were not temptresses who “lured young clerics to disaster” as Peter Heath wrote in 1969, but people whose lives deserve respect equal to any historical actor.31 Plentiful evidence for women living in long-term domestic or sexual relationships with priests exists in visitation and church court records across Europe.32 England is no different. The women were commonly described as “concubines,” a term meant to distinguish them from legitimate wives as well as from women who engaged in onetime or short-term liaisons with priests, who were more likely to be described as whores or simply adulterers.33 This was the language of church reformers, ubiquitous in later medieval sources, but it does not capture the nature of the women’s lives. As Roisin Cossar has put it in her book on clerical households in Italy, “the way the women were named and labeled often reflected the needs of the archive, its records, and their creators as much as the women’s actual identities.”34 Furthermore, accepting the terminology of the records can involve acquiescence in what Anjali Arondekar has called a “policed state of knowledge”: repeating the prejudices of the sources and calling it history.35 In order to think more dispassionately about their lives and experiences, we may now choose less judgmental descriptors, such as “de facto wives” or “sexual and domestic partners.” The phrase “priest’s wife” was in circulation but was meant in a scornful and derogatory fashion. Ruth Mazo Karras’s memorable coinage “unmarriages,” Roisin Cossar’s carefully weighed terminology of “intimates” and “companions,” and Michelle Armstrong-Partida’s description of “marriage-like unions” all reflect the ambiguity that dogs historical reconstruction of such relationships as well as attempt to find a more person-centered terminology.36

Large numbers of women formed domestic and sexual partnerships with priests that lasted for years. Around 1389, the parishioners of Donhead St. Mary in Wiltshire reported that their rector had kept a woman “publicly in his house” for many years, having many children with her. In 1397, the parishioners of Dilwyn in Herefordshire said that a widow called Joan had lived with the chaplain for a long time. In 1413, the Leicestershire vicars of Belton and Sheyle were both noted to have lived with women “for a long time.” At Patrixbourne, Kent, in 1511, Alice Claryngbole was “openly knowen” to live in adultery with the vicar.37 Such relationships would have had many of the social characteristics of lawful marriages and were sometimes even described in the same language. For instance, at Lichfield in 1465 the chaplain John Dalby was said to fornicate with Alice Smyth while “holding her as a wife” (manente eam pro uxore).38 There is, admittedly, a good deal of tension in that terse remark. Husbands and wives could not “fornicate” together—that generally meant unlawful sex between unmarried people—so the phrase “as a wife’ seems to have been as much derogatory as it was descriptive. The descriptive element is there nonetheless: their relationship was long term and domestic rather than a one-off encounter. Another way of signaling the stability in some de facto clerical marriages was to emphasize commensality. At Chirbury in Shropshire toward the end of the fourteenth century, a Welsh woman called Nest lived with a priest “in one and the same house and at the same table, as man and wife.”39 The simulacrum of marriage was here signified by sharing a table rather than a bed.

Such women were clearly well-integrated into the domestic economy of clerical households. We can justifiably imagine them controlling resources, setting the pattern of the day, and having a hand in the management of servants, just like the lawful wives of laymen.40 Scholarship on the lyrics known as “women’s songs,” also demonstrates that it was possible to imagine women as the instigators of mutually satisfying sexual relationships with clerics.41 There is every reason to assume that many women entered into such partnerships confidently and with their eyes open. Some even brought valuable resources to their domestic partnership. One woman who lived with a priest in fourteenth-century Shropshire was known by a Welsh byname, Meueddus, meaning rich or wealthy.42

As in other areas of Europe, many female intimates of priests are likely to have lived relatively undisturbed by either local disapproval or the unwanted attentions of church authorities. Reading the evidence of English visitations carefully can elicit something of this. Care is needed because visitations were the product of disciplinary collaborations between a bishop (or other churchman) and parishioners, and we do not always know whose “voice” we are hearing. Whereas Michelle Armstrong-Partida argues that only personal grudges, and not moral values, caused the Catalonian parishioners she studied to report clerical unions, it may not be appropriate to prejudge motivations in individual cases.43 Mention of priests’ “wives” in our records are disciplinary moments, not simply windows into social reality. There is often some tension between toleration and condemnation in the lay attitudes stimulated by judicial processes. For instance, women who had lived with priests “for a long time” before anyone protested their presence had clearly found a degree of acceptance in their parishes, but when they were reported, it was a meaningful event in their lives. At Winterbourne Dauntsey in Dorset, for instance, Agnes Thechar was said to have lived with a chaplain for a long time, despite him having been disciplined on a previous occasion by the archdeacon.44 Many women must have girded themselves to weather these occasional storms of unwanted attention, valuing their continuing attachment to the priest in their lives.

The lives of clerics’ female companions were rarely easy. While in terms of gender position they may have been no worse off than the wives of ordinary parishioners, they also experienced significant social challenges. They were watched, sometimes hounded, and quite often severely punished.45 Visitation reports often mention that women lived with priests “suspiciously,” but at times the public disapproval could become more pointed and deleterious.46 We catch a glimpse of the particularly punitive atmosphere in one Lincolnshire parish from the records of a local church court. At Strubby, two women who had long-term relationships with parish chaplains suffered a great deal. Isolde Brinkhill was repeatedly accused over a period of five years, before she admitted to her long cohabitation with a chaplain in 1342. Caving in to public pressure brought her no relief, however, as she was flogged three times around the church and square in the village and forced from her home under threat of excommunication. Agnes Base was reported twelve times for incontinence with the chaplain William Boner between 1336 and 1346; she was flogged around the church and market twelve times in 1342, fined 12 pence, and ordered to leave the chaplain’s house; in 1344, she was again flogged twelve times around the church. But despite these penances, she labored under continuing suspicion, presumably because she remained with William.47 Other women were subjected to financial threats if they would not leave their clerical “husbands.” Denise Sturys of Fordington in Dorset was ordered to leave the vicarage on pain of a 100 shilling (5 pound) fine. Through an analysis of the consistory court records of Hereford diocese in the fifteenth century, Janelle Werner has discovered that women involved in sexual relationships with priests were treated far more harshly than the men.48 In the case of Agnes Base of Strubby, her lover William Boner was not punished at all. At Baswich, Staffordshire, in 1288, the penance for fornication enjoined on William the Clerk was to say the psaltery twenty times, while his lover Alice was whipped three times around the church.49 Despite seeking, and surely often finding, stability in their relationships with priests, these women are likely, on average, to have led lives more insecure than those of either their lawfully married neighbors or their clerical companions.

One aspect of the precarity endured by women in clerical partnerships was the way in which those left single following the death of their partner or the end of the relationship were unable subsequently to form legitimate marriages with laymen. For example, the life choices of Alice of Greenhill seem to have been constrained by her relationship with a priest. In 1466, she was reported during a visitation of Lichfield for “paying attention to a priest living outside the town.” She was said to have lived with this man and had two children by him. But when Alice appeared to answer the charge, she told the official how her companion had died seven years earlier, since when she had actually formed a second union with another priest, by whom she had had two further children. Alice was punished for her sins by a formal penance involving flogging, and she was banned from seeing her lover again under threat of further beatings.50 Having lost the relative stability of one clerical “unmarriage,” it seems that all she could do to secure a home for her children was to find another priest to take her in. Such situations must have been common, and the legal and emotional ramifications could be felt by the whole family.51 This was evoked in Robert Mannyng’s moralistic poem Handlyng Synne (c. 1310), which tells the story of a priest’s widow and her sons. After their father’s death, the children (three of whom had been ordained as priests themselves) felt ashamed of their mother’s “sin” and the illegitimacy of their births.52

Lawfully married or not, women who lived in some form of sexual or domestic partnership with a man had an interest in the stability of their household and the security that provided. There is no reason to think that priests’ companions felt this any less keenly than their legitimate counterparts in lay households. Nor should we imagine them being any less capable of acting to defend it. This is vividly illustrated in a story told in an early fourteenth-century northern English text.

The Lanercost Chronicle was compiled by Augustinian canons, based on a Franciscan original.53 Friars and canons were “regular” clergy, living under the regulation of a vow like monks and nuns, but they often also had pastoral responsibilities for laypeople. Augustinian canons sometimes carried out sacerdotal roles in English towns from the twelfth century onward, while Franciscan friars became specialist preachers and confessors.54 These activities made them competitors with the “secular” clergy (so-called because they were in “the world” or saeculum) who staffed parish churches. When a “regular” chronicle tells a story about the secular clergy, we should therefore treat it as satirical in its intent. The Lanercost story revolves around the purported experiences of a priest’s female companion, at a level of detail not present in the visitation evidence, though it is of visitation that it speaks:

There was a certain vicar, truly lewd and notorious who, although often punished on account of a lover whom he kept, did not thereafter desist from sinning. But when the bishop arrived on his ordinary visitation, the wretch was suspended [from office] and made subject to the prelate’s mercy. Overcome with shame, he returned home and, beholding his beloved, poured forth his sorrows, blaming the woman for his situation. Enquiring further, she learnt the cause of his agitation and became bitterly aware that she was to be cast out. To lift his spirits, she said to him “Put away that notion, and I will get the better of the bishop.” The next day, as the bishop was hastening to the vicar’s church, she met him on the way while carrying porridge, chickens and eggs. On his drawing near, she greeted him reverently with bowed head. When the prelate enquired whence she came and whither she was going, she replied: “My lord, I am the concubine of that vicar, and I am hastening to the bishop’s sweetheart, who was lately unwell, and I wish to be as much comfort to her as I can.” This pricked his conscience; straightaway he resumed his progress to the church, and, meeting the vicar, told him to prepare for celebrating [divine services]. The other reminded him of his suspension, and he [the bishop] stretched out his hand and gave him absolution. The sacrament having been performed, the bishop hastened away from the place without another word.55

We must remember that this was an invented story, told for polemical purposes. As satire it was intended to highlight the alleged immorality of the parish clergy, but it also reveals some assumptions about priests’ de facto wives. We know from the visitation data that many priests did indeed live with female companions, and we know that bishops periodically attempted to discipline such couples. Certain details in the story seem intended to be plausible. Among them is the suggestion that priests’ companions were vulnerable to homelessness if bishops insisted on the letter of the law. In the story, the woman’s vulnerability was amplified when her partner lurched from shame to recrimination, aligning himself with the very law that made her situation impossible. Other details are less plausible, such as the arrival of the bishop in person, just one day after a visitation hearing, to check that his injunction was being respected. Follow-up measures would typically take place at a later date: perhaps at another visitation center, in the church courts, or at the next visitation. The immediacy of the bishop’s attention simply works better for the telling of the story.

What the author intended to ridicule we may treat as a plausible situation and interpret in a different way. The character at the center of the tale is a strong woman who gets the better of weak men. This involves taking charge of a priest’s well-being and rising above his feelings and then formulating a plan to thwart a bishop’s decree. In order to carry out her plan she would have had to know about the conduct of visitations, where to intercept the bishop’s party, and how to behave in the presence of churchmen. She would also have had to be well-informed about the bishop’s own sexual and domestic life. All this implies a wide network of connections, receiving news and discussing public events and opinion. Furthermore, her decisions about how to act rest on a resourcefulness and intelligence that must have rung true for many contemporaries. Appearing in the conventional guise of a wife, carrying produce from her homestead, she greets the bishop in a way that acknowledges his status while feigning ignorance of his true identity. She comes across as a competent, determined, knowledgeable woman who was effective where her priest lover was ineffective and who got the better of the bishop. In the end, she silenced him.

The influence of strong women is here revealed as a latent anxiety among the clergy, capable of being weaponized in a polemical battle between the regular and secular clergy.56 A similar fear materializes in a German Dominican sermon exemplum, which has been discussed by Karras. In this story a priest’s concubine is praised by the devil for her prudence in managing the priest’s affairs. “Concubines” were regularly portrayed as greedy, desiring the goods of the church for themselves. Karras suggests that part of the reality behind this may have been that priests’ wives had to struggle for financial support and security for their children, a struggle that was interpreted as feminine avarice.57 This would accord with the precarity that we encountered in the example of Alice of Greenhill. But the Lanercost story implies only contingent insecurity, caused by the interference of outside authority. The “concubine” was striving to safeguard her relative security. While I do not wish to suggest that such women’s lives were in fact secure and easy, the chronicle tells us that some churchmen were afraid that it could be so.

In the Lanercost story, parish priests and bishops are portrayed as susceptible to female influence, a weakness that also feminized them (for further discussion of which see chapter 6). According to the Franciscan and Augustinian authors, they were not the independent and capable males that clerical—as well as lay—masculinity demanded (for which see chapter 4). They were surrounded by, and materially dependent on, women who knew them, their role, their responsibilities and relationships, and who were competent enough to step in when action was required.

Only rarely do such fears materialize in the visitation record, and when they do they are—like the Lanercost story—focused on the disconcerting power of women’s speech. This comes across vividly in a report from Thornton, Buckinghamshire, in 1519, where a woman called Joan Thakkam lived with the rector. She provoked mixed feelings among the parishioners: in common with some other visitation records, a formal report was contradicted by a subsequent remark, presumably representing a different quarter of local opinion. First, it was said that the parishioners suspected no ill of her, except that they found her rather haughty (elata), but then another voice seems to enter the record, saying that she was a scold and a common whore (meretrix) who kept a common tavern in the rectory, living there incontinently with the rector.58 The divergence in opinions arose from different interpretations of her speech: one group found her haughty but respectable; the second thought her speech was unacceptable—she was a scold—and associated this with the bad influence she exerted over the rector and the rectory. Whatever the moral effects of Thakkam’s presence and activities, she was clearly in charge of this priest’s household. Again an anxiety reveals something of reality: the long-term sexual and domestic partners of priests were an important influence over their lives.

Besides the women who lived permanently with priests as their sexual partners, many others were kept at arms’ length. While their direct influence over the lives of the clergy might have been less than that exerted by resident companions, the tenacity with which some such couples continued their relationship indicates that they were meaningful. In 1395, for example, the vicar of White Waltham (Berkshire) was tried by his bishop for bringing a married woman with him when he arrived in the benefice, sometimes keeping her secretly in the vicarage and at times spiriting her across the Thames to Marlow, which was in Lincoln Diocese, where they also kept a home together. Many other women lived in similar on-off situations.59 Some who were called a “priest’s whore” might have been in this category. Others were described as “former concubines,”60 which could mean one of two things. They may have been previously evicted from priests’ homes by church authorities, only to carry on the relationship at a distance. Or they may alternatively have been the repudiated wives or companions of laymen who subsequently entered the priesthood.

That was a situation that could easily befall the wives of parish clerks. These men, whom I discuss in more detail in chapter 4, were not usually priests, but they might have harbored ambitions for a career in the church. Faced with the uncertainty of securing a benefice, which would require them to advance to major orders, they sometimes, Patricia Cullum has suggested, hedged their bets, forming unions with women while purposefully avoiding marriage itself. This would have left their “wives” in a very uncertain position indeed. For instance, the rector of Cardeston, Shropshire, and “his late concubine” aroused suspicion by continuing to visit each other’s homes. They were excommunicated by their bishop. Having separated from a former companion, a clergyman might nonetheless continue to provide for her, implying an ongoing relationship or feeling of responsibility.61 This would not, however, guarantee much to the woman concerned.

The Importance of Servants and Family

In addition to the many women living in sexual or domestic partnerships with priests, an even greater number worked as servants in clerical households. Their history has only just begun to be written in earnest, and the present discussion builds on the important pioneering work of Janelle Werner.62 Men holding rectories or perpetual vicarages could be equivalent in wealth to minor members of the gentry, their estates comparable to small manors, and even some chaplains had a single servant to keep house for them. Household service could provide a home and livelihood for a priest’s female family members, and kinship was often noted in visitation records, presumably as a way of indicating that a relationship was nonsexual and acceptable to local opinion and the law. Mothers and sisters of clergymen are most common, followed by unspecified “kinswomen;” sometimes even priests’ daughters appear in the record, in bland reports that neither condemn nor condone.63 The majority of servants, however, appear to have been unrelated employees.64 Descriptions of them in the visitation evidence are minimal, but we sometimes learn about their ages, with references to old as well as young servants.65 For the most part we can assume that their lives were broadly comparable to those of servants in lay households, and that service was often a temporary life stage.66

The evidence of visitations arises from moments when female servants were subjected to greater-than-usual watchfulness, suspicion, and censure. This reduces its value for establishing a chronology of service in clerical households, since mentions of servants were moral and not objective: men and boys are not noted, and general trends across the period cannot be discerned. Most of the evidence comes from a small number of visitations, such as in Lincoln Diocese between 1518 and 1519, that seem to have been concerted campaigns instigated from the highest levels of the church. Nonetheless, it may be the case that in line with secular patterns after the Black Death, priests’ lower incomes meant that they preferred to support living-in servants rather than pay wages to nonresidents and that reduced economic opportunities pushed more young women to seek domestic service work.67 This may have increased the likelihood of moral unease, relative to earlier times. Furthermore, by the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, developments such as the gendered nature of domestic service work, an increasing association of women with unskilled labor, and moral panics about autonomous maidens, mean that female servants may have evoked several mutually reinforcing negative stereotypes, making them especially susceptible to gendered discipline.68

We see a range of local responses to a bishop’s moral agenda. Parish representatives sometimes felt that there was nothing suspicious about a servant, calling her “honest” or unsuspected.69 At Saxby in Lincolnshire, in 1519, the parishioners reported that the rector lived with “two good women, but they all live honestly,” while at Waddingham “the women of the said rector are said to be of good-enough and harmless (illese) reputation, and of honest life.”70 However, female servants were commonly suspected of being the sexual partners of priests. Here we face a significant problem of interpretation. As discussed in relation to priests’ domestic and sexual partners, the categories ascribed to women were never objective and uncontested. The labels “concubine” and “servant” reflect the moral judgments of authority and may have only a tangential relationship with reality. For example, when at Bishops Castle in Shropshire a woman called Isabel was described as “concubine and servant” of the vicar in 1397, the first of these terms was being used to cast suspicion on the second. At Harrington in Lincolnshire, a 1519 report referring to a “suspected servant,” whom the rector removed just before the bishop’s visitation, should be read as an imposition of a disciplinary category, not an objective comment on the woman’s life.71 Local opinion could also objectify female servants: one Lincolnshire parish reported that their rector lived with “two quite beautiful women” (mulieres satis formosus), which suggests a culture of objectification and prurience behind the moral discipline. The interpretative danger is only magnified when we take into account the easy connection made by many medieval writers between servants and sexual partners.72 Resisting this is a necessary prerequisite for understanding the ineffable variety and subjectivity of women’s experiences in clerical households.

Sometimes the parishioners’ report might be contradicted, creating a crack in the archival edifice into which we can drive an interpretative wedge. At Biddesden, Dorset, in 1394, when the rector was faced with the claim that he continued to support a woman who had once been his sexual partner, he denied it and said she was very old and he had maintained her out of charity.73 The fact that we can see the means by which female servants were kept under surveillance allows us to extract their lives and their historical significance from that disciplinary apparatus. We have indisputable evidence that women in priests’ homes could be subjected to high levels of suspicion, and we know they were usually economically and politically weak, but it would be wrong to assume they were without influence. Passively, their labors enabled clergymen to fulfil their public role, while a more direct, active influence was exerted wherever there were cooperative or trusting relations between employer and employee. We see little of this in the visitation record, it being so focused on moral discipline, but occasional comments and other sources hint at the importance of such women in clerics’ lives.

At Haugh in Lincolnshire, for instance, the vicar was said to work in the fields alongside the girl whom he kept in his house.74 The complaint contains a criticism of the vicar for participating in manual labor (for more on which subject, see chapter 4) and for cohabiting with a girl, but there also seems to be an objection to the social parity implied by them working side by side. In a somewhat different example, a woman called Maud Pychard was acting as the executor of the late rector of Anderson, Dorset, in 1405. We can infer that she was a relative, who had perhaps been his live-in housekeeper, since she was expected to discharge a duty of hospitality arising from the rector’s membership of a local guild. Each time a guildsman died, his relatives were supposed to provide a breakfast for the other members.75 The general expectation is likely to have been that this duty would fall to a widow or to children, but in the case of a priest, the most likely relict was a mother or sister. Maud’s character and capability are hinted at by her refusal to comply with the guild’s expectation. Just because female servants and relatives in clerical households are marginal to the historical record, does not mean they were marginal to clerical lives. On the contrary, I think we can assume that they occupied a central position.

Turning to textual sources, we can find other hints at the influence enjoyed by female servants. A verse sermon from the Northern Homily Cycle (written around 1300), whose complex critique of the loves and friendships of the clergy are further analyzed in chapter 4, bases one element of its social commentary on the assumption that priests’ servants were important figures in their households. Introducing a priest’s female servant, the author comments:

So lange wonid scho with him thare,

That scho the prestis keyes bare.

He fand hir lele in dede and wise,

For to do all his servise.76

[So long lived she with him there,

That she the priest’s keys bore.

He found her loyal in deed and ways

To see to all his needs.]

The reader is asked to agree with a number of things about a female servant’s life. We are encouraged to see long service as normal and to accept a certain closeness—expressed as loyalty—arising from this. Saying that she bore the keys, probably wearing them on her belt, signifies her power within the household, implying either an equal partnership of sorts or perhaps the priest’s reliance on his female servant.77 At this point in the sermon the exact nature of her status is kept ambiguous. She seems like a wife or the housekeeper in a gentry household: assured, reliable, knowledgeable, and central. Of course caution is warranted in reading literary texts as historical sources, but here the very ambiguity of the satire is what makes it interesting. Any priest who made himself dependent on a female servant was suspicious, whether or not they were in a sexual relationship and notwithstanding the conciliar decree that distinguished concubines from female relatives beyond reproach.78 Women in priest’s houses were a cause of deep anxiety among churchmen.

Female Patrons of Parish Churches

Every parish church or chapel and any altar served by a priest had a patron who was responsible for nominating clergy to it. In fact, this was a highly valued and jealously guarded right, known as “advowson.” It was sometimes treated as marketable property. Priests in search of a benefice (an appointment as a rector or a perpetual vicar) would have had to court potential patrons who would be locally and sometimes nationally powerful figures.

A small but significant proportion of patrons were women, either female members of the gentry or abbesses and prioresses of convents. They have not been much studied by historians, and there has been no analysis of their relative presence over time.79 The numbers of women presenting clergy to churches are not great. We can get a sense of the scale of female patronage by taking a snapshot of two bishops’ registers from the end of the fourteenth century. The register of Bishop John Gilbert of Hereford (1375–89) records the installation of 240 clergy to rectories, vicarages, prebends, and chantries. Of these, 11 (just under 5 percent) were presented by lay female patrons and 2 (1 percent) by the prioresses of local religious houses. Some of the laywomen were extremely powerful national figures, such as Philippa, the countess of March, who presented a priest to the chantry in Cleobury Mortimer church, while others were the lords of small local manors, such as Edith, the lady of Easthope, who presented to the rectory of Easthope. We find very similar numbers in the register of Gilbert’s successor John Trefnant (1389–1404), including several mentions of Sibilla Pembridge, who was presenting clergy to the chantry of Mansell Gamage for almost a decade. Out of 362 installations of clergy across the diocese, 19 (just over 5 percent) were made by laywomen and 8 (2 percent) by prioresses.80 Across the later Middle Ages, Nigel Saul has found, somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of appointments to benefices (rectories and vicarages) were made by gentry patrons of any gender, indicating the significance of the 5 percent made by laywomen.81 In this context the numbers of women in Gilbert’s and Trefnant’s registers can be interpreted in two ways. We might say that female presentation was frequent enough to have been a reasonably familiar occurrence but infrequent enough to have acted as a reminder that authority over churches, as over everything else, was gendered masculine and associated with males.

When an advowson formed part of the inheritance of a married gentry woman, she might act to appoint the rector in concert with her husband. Barbara Harris gives two Norfolk examples of this. Sir Robert Wingfield and his wife, Lady Anne Scrope, acted together to appoint the rector of East Harling church in 1474, and Lady Jane Berners did likewise with her husband, Sir Edmund Knyvett, in 1533 for Ashwellthorpe.82 We find two examples of married couples exercising their right of advowson jointly in Shropshire in 1399—William and Johanna Eton at Hopton Cangeford, and Thomas and Johanna Steves at Wheathill—without knowing the reason why.83 Clearly this was not unheard of, but most women who appointed clergy were widows. Sometimes they were identified as such, as in the case of Johanna, “widow of” John de Bourchope, who presented her candidate for the parish of Bishopstone in Herefordshire in 1388, or Johanna, the wife of Robert de Borgoiloun, deceased, at Thursford in Norfolk in 1322.84 The latter was acting in place of her son, who was underage at the time. At Holverston in Norfolk in the early fourteenth century, we find the two situations rolled into one. The patron at the time was the dowager (widowed) countess of Norfolk, Alice of Hainault, but she was on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and unable to make the presentation in person, as was expected. Instead, she nominated her attorney Robert de Reydone and his wife, Letitia de Wingfield, to act on her behalf.85

Female and male patrons probably behaved in some very similar ways. But this does not mean that the experience of the parish rector or vicar concerned would be unaffected by gender. Being dependent on the patronage of a woman was an inversion of the gender order, made palatable only by the class distinctions between patron and client. If sufficiently powerful, women holding lordship might exert influence over churches in their manors even when they did not hold the advowson. For example, Isabella de Vesci, a cousin of Edward II and member of the queen’s household, was lord of the manor of Heckington in Lincolnshire. The patron was the abbot of Bardney, who acquiesced in Isabella’s choice of rector; she then collaborated with the rector in the creation of a new sculptural scheme of decoration. The fascinating aspect of this architectural patronage is that the decoration depicted sins often gendered female, including vanity and gossip.86 There is no reliable way to interpret such choices, but one possibility is that because female power over parish churches was an exception to the gendered norm, it may have represented a threat to male clerical authority. If that was felt at Heckington, the church’s striking visual scheme could have been an attempt to neutralize a woman’s authority with sculptural allusions to feminine weakness.

Although female patronage of parish churches was common, it was not the norm. But in those parishes where a gentry widow or an abbess held the advowson, the appointment of clergy, negotiations over building works, and memorialization would have been factors shaping clerical lives in important ways. Rectors and vicars needed to be on good terms with their own patrons, and with the patrons of churches which might form the next steppingstone of their career. This gave a certain category of elite woman considerable influence over the parish clergy. When women founded hospitals, chantries, and schools, their involvement was even more direct, making them a constant presence in clerical lives. In all these examples, the key point to bear in mind is that female patronage meant women having some influence and authority over the male clergy of parishes.

There were many women in priests’ lives, often exerting considerable influence over the management of his household and, by extension, over aspects of the priest’s public role. The cumulative effect of this was very great, but—as we have seen in this chapter—it was made up of a wide range of actions and relationships encompassing some very different gendered experiences. Female gentry patrons were wealthy and occupied a station in life that gave them considerable opportunities despite their being subject to legal and cultural constraints based on ideas about femininity. The wives of churchwardens and parish representatives were the backbone of local life in terms of sociability, fundraising, and many practical organizational tasks, but because they were excluded from a formal role in disciplining the parish clergy, when they wanted to correct a priest’s behavior, they had to influence the male visitation jurors, engage in legally risky public accusations, or resort to direct action.

Servants and female family members living with priests had some security whatever their economic background; while the former were susceptible to public suspicion, all women in this category exerted considerable and constant influence over the lives and households of priests. When we consider the de facto wives of priests, the importance of that influence can be multiplied many times over, even despite their social position being sometimes desperately precarious. It seems reasonable to assume that such women were capable and, in their various roles, knowledgeable about how parishes were governed and managed: the frequency and itinerary of visitations, the politics of parish representation, the buildings, the services, church goods, glebe, tithes, and so on all formed part of their repertoire of expertise. They were also savvy about how to navigate relationships, both within the parish and with outside authorities.

There was intense cognitive dissonance between the need for parish clergy to be supported by women, and the danger that female influence was imagined to pose to male clergy. Manly clerical independence, so important for the model of governance described in chapter 1, was compromised by the ubiquity and ordinariness of female influence.87 While individual women might be appreciated or tolerated much of the time, their proximity to clerical power—power over the business of the parish—made their presence troubling. The anxiety produced by the parish clergy’s dependence on women made waves in the literary satire and periodic discipline that have furnished our evidence so far.

While the heads of female religious houses, who formed the “ghostly appearance of power” within diocesan administration, were kept distant from the business of bishop’s households, the women of the parish were present in proximity to the everyday governance of the church at this more local level. This had three consequences. First, their influence on the parish was constant and extensive. Second, wherever there was clerical inaction or incompetence, women were among those likely to step in to manage aspects of parish business, meaning that on occasion their importance would have become more visible and perhaps more open to criticism. Third, their ubiquity meant that they could not be ignored: the questions raised by their influence stoked the anxieties of masculine church culture. This added up to a considerable ghostly potential for female influence to haunt the parish. It was something real that could not be acknowledged, let alone allowed to prevail.