The Structures of Discipline

The clergy were difficult to control. In the first place, it was hard to remove a beneficed priest from his position. Rectories, chantries, and some vicarages were valuable freehold tenures under the control of independent lay and religious patrons, who also took the lead in appointing clergy to them. Although bishops gave the rubber stamp (“institution”) to a patron’s choice (“presentation” or the right of “advowson”), that did not create an automatic episcopal right to remove an under-performing or scandalous priest. Even where the bishop was himself the patron of a benefice, it could only be taken away from a lawfully instituted priest by legal action whose costs and political ramifications could spiral out of control.10 The unbeneficed clergy—chaplains, curates, “stipendiary” priests (remunerated by wages rather than the income from lands and rents), deacons, and subdeacons—were appointed by the incumbent priest, the patron, or the parishioners and owed very little to bishops. Bishops could issue a ruling, known as sequestration, that temporarily suspended a priest’s access to the income from his benefice; this was a real sanction, but politically sensitive given the interests of patrons.

Disciplining the parish clergy was therefore conducted mainly through penances imposed by bishops, which could be private, such as fasting and prayer, or public, such as flogging or pilgrimages. One other option was the ritual of purgation, which involved a miscreant priest finding “oath-helpers” to make a public declaration to his innocence. Both routes worked by shaming the delinquent priest before his parishioners and clerical peers. In accordance with the use of shaming in many cultures, they aimed at the reintegration rather than removal of an offender.11 Penance involved contrition and forgiveness, while purgation was a denial of guilt. Reintegrative punishments were appropriate to a system of discipline that relied on suspicion and appearances. That suspicion was directed toward the clergy from above and from below, with bishops inviting parishioners to be watchful of every aspect of their clergy’s lives.

The later medieval church was heir to a long period of change in the relationship between the parish clergy and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the culture of watchfulness and censure evolved substantially over time. During the formative period of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the aim to protect church property was pursued by insisting on clerical celibacy and outlawing the transmission of churches between fathers and sons; the means to achieve this were a heightened corporate status for the clergy as a whole, alongside much greater intrusion into the lives of individual priests, holding their performance and behavior up for scrutiny. Following this, from the later twelfth century onward, legislative codification at general councils of the church, by individual papal initiative and through local enactments in provincial councils and diocesan synods, communicated the new behavioral standards. The mechanisms were the copying of legal texts, large gatherings of clergy, and associated campaigns of preaching and persuasion. But in the later thirteenth century, the relationship between parish clergy and their superiors changed more fundamentally with the gradual but eventually widespread adoption of regular discipline through visitations, supplemented by the use of the church courts.12

This chapter is largely based on visitation records, whose evidence has already been used piecemeal in chapter 3. Visitations give us the fullest picture of how the clergy experienced discipline. They were usually held at regular intervals, giving all concerned predictable opportunities to seek redress for grievances.13 This meant their procedures were woven into the fabric of the very relationships that they were used to regulate. An underperforming or unpopular priest knew that his parishioners would be able to complain about him and when their chance would come. The sort of evidence produced by this web of social and institutional practices is therefore much more indicative of general experience than the exceptional circumstances that we read about in court cases, or the norms expressed in legislation, two classes of source that have distorted previous historical understanding of clerical discipline. For example, historians such as Margaret Bowker (even though she knew the visitation material intimately) and Helen Parish (who did not use it) mistakenly identified sexual incontinence as the most frequent complaint made about the parish clergy of late medieval England. When Jennifer Thibodeaux proposed that social behavior (violence, drinking, gambling, and so on) was at least as important a component of clerical masculinity as sexuality, her research was indeed based on visitations; however, she did not carry out a quantitative assessment of the reported faults, and her categories of “masculine” behavior were not as broad as those used in the present study.14

In order to establish the relative importance of different facets of masculinity in clerical discipline, this chapter begins with a quantification based on a large sample of the extant English medieval visitation records. The dataset comprises 2,389 reports of clerical faults from thirteen documented visitations of parishes, spanning the period between 1284 and 1528. It includes visitations conducted by bishops, archdeacons, cathedral deans, and the judges of two peculiar jurisdictions. It covers cathedral towns, smaller urban centers, and a wide range of rural economic landscapes. Although this sample of documents is a fraction of the surviving corpus, it is nonetheless reasonably representative of the issues that concerned visitors and parishioners. Differences between visitations must, however, be considered. No single record can, on its own, be taken as representative of conditions across two and a half centuries of English church history. The contents differ depending on a number of factors. For instance, while complaints about beneficed rectors and perpetual vicars are common in episcopal visitations, the focus in decanal, prebendal, and other “peculiar” jurisdictions generally turns to the salaried chaplains or “parish priests” employed by the institutional rector. Equally, while it is the case that the questions posed by visitors covered broadly the same range of issues across this period, it is clear that certain administrative and moral campaigns (against heresy in 1413 or women living with the clergy in 1517–19, for example) distinguish one visitation from another.15 There is no discernible general change in the nature of discipline across the period.

A further interpretative issue of great importance revolves around the question of whose words and values we encounter when reading visitations. Some historians have assumed that the words used in visitation records were those of the visitor, and that the process reflects a top-down imposition of universal church values on the parishes. This perspective can be found in older histories, such as Peter Heath’s study of the medieval English clergy, but also in more recent, and more distinguished, work in social and gender history. For instance, Janelle Werner’s important article on priests and female servants assumes that comments on whether a woman was suspicious or “honest” were solely the bishop’s assessment, while Armstrong-Partida’s essential book on clerical households in Catalonia argues that the normative standards required by visitors would have struck parishioners as “unfamiliar clerical gender ideals.”16 However, a number of factors indicate that this is too simplistic. When certain aspects of visitation practice are analyzed in detail, it becomes apparent that the language of the records was formed in dialogue. The role of the laity in making reports, the subtle variations between different entries on the same topic, the differences between places, and the sequence of procedural and manuscript episodes on the page all point toward this. The way in which offenders were described and the values permeating the whole process were lay responses to the visitor’s questions, framed by some basic categories supplied by canon law and the scribe’s habits. Margaret Bowker’s 1968 book on the diocese of Lincoln was somewhat unusual for its time in treating visitation reports as evidence for the standards expected by parishioners, rather than by the bishop, and Roisin Cossar’s 2017 study of Italian visitations notes that clerical and lay respondents alike seem to have calibrated their answers according to local and personal contingencies. Differences in practice across Europe mean that visitations cannot quite be compared like for like, but in England the usual procedure was for a panel of laymen to represent their parish, making their reports a collective local response to the agenda set by the visitor.17 The resulting record was a reflection of discipline exerted as much from below as from above.

The visitations included in the sample are two rolls recording episcopal visitations of churches near Leominster and Ledbury, Herefordshire, in 1284 and 1286, respectively (34 reports of clerical faults);18 eight rolls of visitations and “chapters” of the parishes—in Cheshire, Staffordshire, and the jurisdiction of “the Peak” in Derbyshire—appropriated to the dean and chapter of Lichfield Cathedral, from 1292 to 1347 (79 reports of clerical faults);19 visitations or chapters of the Lincolnshire parishes appropriated to the common fund of Lincoln Cathedral, held at semiannual intervals between 1336 and 1349 (121 reports of clerical faults);20 two substantial visitations of the diocese of Salisbury, in 1391 and 1394, recorded in Bishop John Waltham’s general episcopal register (208 reports of clerical faults);21 a visitation of Hereford diocese by Bishop John Trefnant in 1397 (386 reports of clerical faults);22 visitations of the bishop of Worcester’s peculiar jurisdiction at Hartlebury, Worcestershire, between 1401 and 1528 (22 reports of clerical faults);23 visitations of the prebendal and deanery churches of Salisbury Cathedral between 1405 and 1412 (381 reports of clerical faults);24 a visitation of the archdeaconry of Leicester carried out by Bishop Repingdon of Lincoln in 1413 (75 reports of clerical faults);25 “courts” held in the deanery of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, between 1458 and 1484 (62 reports of clerical faults);26 visitations of the city churches in Lichfield, subject to the dean of the cathedral, between 1461 and 1471 (37 reports of clerical faults);27 visitations and chapters held by the archdeacon of Buckingham between 1483 and 1523 (48 reports of clerical faults);28 Archbishop William Warham’s visitations of the archdeaconry of Canterbury in 1511 and 1512 (220 reports of clerical faults);29 Bishop William Atwater’s visitation of Lincoln Diocese carried out between 1517 and 1519 (669 reports of clerical faults).30

Among the 2,389 complaints about the parish clergy found in my sample of thirteen late medieval visitations, 867 (36%) concerned the proper performance of a priest’s liturgical, sacramental, or pastoral role, in which category I have included failure to appoint sufficient clergy to serve the church; 718 complaints (30%) addressed what could be described as material or economic issues arising from priests’ statuses as householders. This category includes the economic management of the benefice, its unjust exploitation, the alienation of church goods, malfeasance with respect to various financial obligations, and failure to keep the chancel of the church and the priest’s house in good repair. Thibodeaux’s contention that social or bodily expectations were more significant than sexual behavior in defining priestly masculinity is not supported straightforwardly by this dataset: sexual behavior accounts for 16 percent of the total while social expectations are mentioned only half as often. But the category of the “presence of women” complicates this: some mentions of women in priests’ households hold no suspicion of sexual activity, referring to mothers and sisters or explicitly ruling out suspicion, while others imply considerable misgivings. This category therefore straddles the sexual and the social. But however one reads that portion of the data, the regulation of clerical masculinity was most concerned with the priest’s sacramental and pastoral role, then with his economic and domestic responsibilities, and less so with his sexual behavior and adherence to the other social expectations. This quantification substantially reorients our sense of how clerical masculinity was experienced, perceived, and regulated. The following analysis examines the major areas in turn, looking at the patterns, language, and consequences of discipline.

The Priest’s Ministries

Visitation reports demonstrate that across England, from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, the laymen responsible for reporting faults in their parishes had strong feelings about the duties of their clergy. Those feelings might not have been shared precisely with the church hierarchy, but they were moved by a deep sense of propriety. Everywhere they wanted clergy who were resident in the parish and willing and able to perform the sacraments (of baptizing infants, marriage, penance, the Eucharist, and the last rites for the dead), hold church services, and distribute charity to the needy. It was common at the time to think of clerical presence in the parish as the sine qua non for appropriate pastoral care, and so complaints of absenteeism and the failure to appoint assistant clergy have been added to the reports detailing particular lapses.31 All told, this category accounts for 36 percent of all complaints made about the clergy during visitations. The majority (712 out of 867) relate to beneficed rectors or vicars, but chaplains account for 109 complaints about neglected ministries.

The priest as minister—conducting services, preaching, administering the sacraments—embodied the ideal of the man made in God’s image and the pastor modeled on Christ. As representatives of God, they echoed the manhood of divine majesty, which was ubiquitous in the repetition of shared masculine pronouns wherever God and the clergy were mentioned. In the Middle English Quattuor Sermones (c. 1483) this was made plain: “for as much as he [God] is not here with us in the form of a man, therefore he ordained men to be his vicars.”32 Priests served the people as the male representatives of a male God, making all expectations of them gendered in at least a tacit way.

The most common complaint of parishioners was that they did not have enough resident clergy. Sometimes this was connected to an explicit complaint about tasks left undone, as in the 1394 report from Longbridge Deverill in Wiltshire that “the parish clerk is a vagabond who does not perform his duties as he should,” or that from Maulden, Bedfordshire, in 1518 that the rector is not resident and can therefore “do nothing good in the parish.”33 Resident priests and clerks were also sometimes reported for failing to live up to their parishioners’ expectations in the most general terms. They were “inexperienced at performing the cure of souls” or simply “unsuitable.” Unsuitability could mean a lack of ability or application to the job, as in reports that a priest failed to say Mass or perform the regular services, or it could mean that he was disqualified by some defect of status.34

Visitors were responsible for enforcing the rule that priests had to be properly ordained, and parishioners seem to have felt there was something wrong or even dishonest if a cleric serving their church was inauthentic in some way. For example, monks and friars who had abandoned their orders were reported as serving churches in some places, while at Stickney in Lincolnshire the man working as a chaplain was revealed to be a knight.35 At the visitation of Bridge parish, Kent, in 1511 the parishioners reported that they lacked an “honest” priest, meaning that the friar celebrating services there was either not properly ordained as a priest or not instituted by the bishop.36 The boundaries of ordination and suitability could also be brought together for rhetorical effect, as in a complaint made during the visitation of Berkshire in 1391. There, some parish representatives reported that their chaplain failed to perform the sacraments and seemed “like a layman and without understanding.”37 In this statement, the derogatory comparison of a priest to a layman, which several historians have noted in the regulation of clerical sexuality, was being used to discipline someone who failed in his priestly ministries.

Comparison to “honest” or “proper” priests on the one hand, and to unsuitable laymen on the other, were means to discipline the fallible men who occupied priestly office. Complaints were often bodily, remarking on movement or the voice. For instance, the vicar of Downton in Wiltshire was reported in 1394 for carrying the consecrated communion bread around the parish “in his bosom.” This was forbidden by canon law, which stipulated that the bread that represented or became the “body of Christ” was to be carried in a special container called a pyx. The vicar’s excuse was that the parish was so large that this was not practical, but the complaint seems to be based on a sense that sacramental propriety had been breached. Although priests’ bodies were meant to represent the perfection of Christ, it seems they were regarded as too human to bear the divine corpus.38 Complaints about the way in which the priest used his body to conduct services further suggests a culture of critical watchfulness. A number of influential synodal texts, among them the 1222 statutes of Oxford, demanded that priests do this “in a clear, plain and full voice.”39 Speech was policed in gendered terms. The clear, plain, and full voice of the priest was thus an articulation of his proper physical masculinity. There doesn’t seem to be any hint of a distinction between lay and clerical masculinity. The important thing was that priests spoke like men, not like women. For instance, when Archbishop Chichele’s statutes for the secular priests of Brackley Hospital (c. 1425) condemned their chattering in church, his concern was that such priests could not set an example to laymen if they behaved in a manner usually associated with laywomen.40 At Tarvin in Cheshire in 1317, the clerk was said to sing tunelessly and carelessly, while at Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire in 1518, the vicar’s voice was reported as being too quiet; at Alcumbury in Huntingdonshire the same year, the vicar was simply “too slow” (morosus) in saying the Easter service.41 The priest in the latter example was ordered to deliver services in a more praiseworthy voice, indicating how the body became subject to institutional demands.

Priests might fall short of parishioners’ expectations due to ill-health or old age, making them “incapable” (impotens) of serving a parish. For example, at Thornton, Leicestershire, in 1413, the chaplain was reported to appear frantic or mad (freneticus). In an earlier case of mental disturbance, from Ledbury (Herefordshire) in 1286, the parishioners made an explicit link between clerical health and sacramental ministry. Their chaplain had been revealing the confessions of parishioners because he was “frantic and raging” mad (freneticus et furiosus), and the other chaplains were too young. They went on to name alternative priests, to whom they would be prepared to confess.42 The mad priest was not stable enough to serve them, and youth was likewise associated with unreliable judgment, suggesting that notions of the suitable priest were closely bound up with the ideal of the healthy adult male.

Besides conformity to bodily expectations, the ministry of priests was also judged in terms of their character. Interestingly, this took the form of subtle and highly gendered interpretations of the priest’s zeal and restraint, themes that we will encounter a number of times when examining different aspects of his role. The priest who did not display enough fervor in the conduct of church services might be called “lukewarm and negligent” (tepidus et negligens).43 Tepidity was a byword for weakness in a man, caused by a deficiency in the heat that made men the more active sex. It was also an inherently comparative judgment: “not warm enough” or disappointingly cool. A man who was lukewarm failed to be as masculine as he ought, though he might still possess more vitality than a woman.44 Priests, therefore, were expected to be manly enough to perform their ministries with sound and strong intent. In the words of the Quatuor Sermones author, paraphrasing St. Bernard’s Liber de praecepto et dispensatione, this meant “not missing words out, nor mumbling nor musing of vanities, not meddling with lewd nor shrewd tidings nor dishonest communication, nor coming late to God’s service nor going out before the end without a reasonable cause, nor groaning or slumbering or sparing their voice, but showing the voice of the holy ghost with sound and whole speech.”45

An ostensibly contradictory deficiency of masculinity was too much vigor. An excess of heat could lead to impetuousness, something that was criticized in a number of lay complaints made to Archbishop Warham’s visitation of Kent in 1511 and 1512, when priests were chastised for performing ministries at their own “pleasure.” In Canterbury, it was reported that a chantry priest “syngithe at his pleasure . . . at seasones uncerteyne & whan he hathe done therwith he will depart and not helpe to maynteigne godds service.” The malfeasance here was thought to arise from him following his own preferences, being too independent. The result for the parishioners was uncertainty. The same problem occurred at Ospringe where the vicar was said to sing his services “now . . . at oone howere, nowe at another, at his owne pleasure” so that due times and order were not kept. The archbishop ordered him to begin Matins at eight and to finish Mass by eleven. At Bridge, meanwhile, the vicar was said to refuse the last rites to anyone who would not “content his mynd” or “aggre with hym aftir his pleasur.” Here a different problem—restricting access to the sacraments—was likewise presented as the result of a priest giving too much latitude to his own will.46

Pleasure is a revealing word. In the reported Middle English speech of some late medieval judicial records, it is emphatically associated with an excessive exertion of the male will. For instance, in the Woolsthorpe case of 1529, discussed in chapter 3, a parish priest was accused of harassing a female parishioner, telling her that he “must nedes have his pleasure of her.”47 Pleasure here meant a lack of restraint, but it could also mean something good, even something desired by God. This duality takes us to the heart of a paradox whose tensions expose the position in which priests found themselves. On the one hand they were expected to act for the good “at their pleasure,” drawing on and fulfilling the manly independence of mind that we encountered in chapter 1. But on the other hand, they were bound by strict expectations and rules and so were not permitted to exercise their discretion without limit. Complaints about their “pleasure” can therefore be interpreted as attempts to regulate the boundaries of clerical independence and, thereby, of clerical masculinity.

The tension is amply revealed in two further cases from the visitation of Kent. At Sturry, the vicar objected to his parishioners asking him to sing services more regularly, saying “Wold ye have me sing masse whan I am not disposed?” He was elevating his pleasure or discretion above their expectations of his duty. The limits to clerical freedom were also expressed by the parish representatives of Sandwich in their complaint that a chantry priest “saiethe not his masse daiely as he ys bound by his fundacione.”48 A man who was “bound” and whose performance of an obligation could be judged by his neighbors, had little room to exercise the freedom that contemporaries would have associated with manhood. But this did not mean that priests were not regarded as men, just that the slippery standards of masculinity were a convenient tool by which the norms of parish ministry could be enforced. This was the primary, conscious, goal of bishops when they used visitation to discipline the clergy, but when the standards of masculinity were mobilized in this way, the all-encompassing (if unarticulated) message was that women were disqualified by default.

The Clergy as Householders

The 718 references in the sampled visitations to the material and economic obligations arising from priests’ status as householders account for 30 percent of all complaints about the clergy. This was clearly a field of action that meant a great deal to parishioners and disciplinary visitors alike.

Such a broad category can be helpfully subdivided into complaints about the physical dilapidation of the rectory or vicarage estate, including the chancel of the parish church (392 examples) and protests about improper economic activity (326 examples). Those of the first sort were, understandably, directed almost exclusively at rectors and perpetual vicars as the responsible property holders. The second type—although still dominated by the beneficed clergy—also included grievances about unbeneficed chaplains serving the parish church, as well as about a handful of parish clerks. Cutting across these subdivisions we find two potentially contradictory understandings of the priest in relation to his material and economic responsibilities. These are the priest as a public office holder, judged according to his performance of an institutional role, and the priest as an independent householder, judged according to the complex of masculine expectations discussed in much of the recent historical literature on this subject.49 The tensions produced by these roles threw clerical masculinity under a spotlight and arguably made it impossible to stabilize.

The beneficed priest, particularly the rector of a parish, was likely to be a socially and economically important figure in his locale. The lands that formed part of a rectory estate (sometimes called a “glebe”) could be substantial, placing some rectors in an economic category along with the lords of single manors and some of the wealthier independent freeholders. For example, at Fordington in Dorset the church was a prebend attached to Salisbury cathedral, and the incumbent was said to “enjoy the entire lordship, holding courts at will.”50 While very few rectors exercised lordship in quite such a literal sense, many enjoyed substantial incomes.

However, countervailing his independence as a little lord, the beneficed priest “had a major obligation to the benefice itself, as a piece of property to be transferred intact to his successors.”51 This exposed a priest’s masculine independence to challenge because he was beholden to lords and patrons. In 1284, the chaplain of Hope-under-Dinmore in Herefordshire was reported at visitation for being under the thumb of a local knight, refusing to begin services until this lord was present. Similarly, at Sixhills, Lincolnshire, in 1519, the vicar was said to wait for the local lord and his wife to appear in church before beginning services, even if all the parishioners were present.52 In both instances the parishioners were upset by what they saw as undue deference. What was a priest to do? If the lord was his patron, he owed him his livelihood, but his masculine independence could be impugned in the eyes of his parishioners by such a performance of subservience. He had exercised too little discretion but at the same time too much: insufficient backbone to stand up to a local lord, excessive independence in making the parishioners wait for their services. Such examples reveal the challenges in balancing contradictory gender expectations, of the sort discussed by Amussen for the early modern period.53

The benefice was, furthermore, subject to the diocesan bishop’s supervision. Bishops acted as brokers in the national (indeed, in some cases international) market for benefices, ensuring that the whole concern was passed intact and profitable from one incumbent to the next. They were therefore interested in harvesting testimony from parishioners about dilapidation and neglect. At Wainfleet All Saints in Lincolnshire, for example, the rector was reported to have “laid waste to the lands of his rectory by the felling of trees and the digging de le turphes to the irredeemable detriment of the benefice.” Chronic failure in this regard could lead to a priest losing the profits (or “fruits”) of his benefice, in the process known as sequestration. In many places, there was also considerable lay scrutiny over clerical finances. One of the best documented is the household of priests serving Munden’s Chantry in Bridport, Dorset, in the mid-fifteenth century. The priests had to render annual accounts for inspection by the bishop of Salisbury’s representative, in addition to the bailiff and community of the town.54 These were forms of accountability not endured by the lay social equals of beneficed clergy. In this sense the priest and his parishioners were not, as Armstrong-Partida has suggested was the case in Catalonia, all alike.55 Although householder masculinity was defined by governance and responsibility, this was expected to come from the man himself, and not from an external authority. The priest who looked to lords and prosperous freeholders as his social equals was thus alienated from one of the foundations of their masculinity: he was expected to govern himself and take responsibility for his estate, but he also labored under supervisory control.

Living like a little lord, but unable to make a compelling social presentation of himself as an independent man, the beneficed priest was in an unstable position. The fragility of his psychosocial situation can only have been exacerbated by the fact that his supervision came from below as well as above. Parishioners were enrolled by the bishop to report on the state of clerical properties, and the same men also made energetic use of visitation to regulate their clergy’s economic relationships with other villagers.56 They might comment on agricultural practices that caused “great nuisance” to the parishioners or that were a “burden” on the common lands of the parish. This point emphasizes the importance of Derek Neal’s observation that “relations with laymen, on laymen’s terms, were central to a cleric’s social existence,” while highlighting how asymmetrical those relationships could become.57 The collective power of the male heads of household in a parish, expressed through the visitation reports of the “trustworthy” representatives, could severely limit priests’ ability to participate in social life on equal terms. In the contemporary terms previously introduced, priests were expected to carry out those things they were “bound” to do according to their institutional position and not to give too much rein to the “pleasure” or freedom that was associated with their social and economic position.

Besides care for property, managing a household involved the rule or governance of dependents, including relatives (children, parents, siblings), other clergy, and servants. The experience of women in priests’ households was discussed in chapter 3. Many dependents and cohabitants were, however, men. Chaplains, deacons, or clerks sometimes lived in the rectory or vicarage, and there were male as well as female servants. If priests had children, they might live with him, although sons seem to be mentioned less often than daughters, perhaps because of the ecclesiastical obsession with the polluting influence of women. This intense anxiety spread from the moralists of the eleventh- and twelfth-century reform period into church laws and visitation questionnaires, coloring the lenses through which ordinary parishioners saw their clergy. Whereas in a lay household, authority over sisters and mothers was a key function of the male head’s projection of masculinity, for a priest it was, as Derek Neal has astutely observed, a double-edged responsibility. On the one hand, dependents could interact with other householders, establishing the priest, their male head, as a participant in the local masculine culture of governance. But on the other hand, dependents were a weak point in the cleric’s social self. Male and female servants could be physically attacked, damaging the clerical householder’s honor, while female servants and relatives left him open to attack on moral and legal grounds, as we saw in the previous chapter. He might be said to keep “unthrifty rule,” a charge that evoked his unsuitability for household governance.58

To sidestep this difficulty, priests were strongly advised to separate themselves from all responsibility for women. Robert Mannyng’s didactic poetry held up the example of St. Jerome, who supposedly went so far as to exclude his own sister from his presence and his thoughts, despite her expressed wish to live with him, while John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests advised the repudiation of female servants “lest they make you of evil fame.”59 Such injunctions were based on fears of sexual pollution, but emotional ties of dependence could also arise from economic interests. For instance, the parish chaplain of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, was sued for defamation in 1469 when he brought his mother’s landholdings into a heated (and rather complex) exchange of money and words. Richard King was in debt to two of his parishioners, but when called on to repay them, he made the irrelevant retaliatory allegation that the wife of one of his creditors had encroached on the headland of his mother’s strips in the open fields.60 This interaction encapsulates the double-edged character of clerical householder masculinity. The chaplain’s remark about his creditor’s wife seems to be one side of a horizontal, if ill-tempered, exchange between two male householders. King was jostling for masculine position by casting aspersions on his parishioner’s inability to control his wife. But the accusation contained the potential to backfire, since King comes across as beholden to his mother, linking her economic interests to his own, and clouding his judgment as to where his responsibilities really lay. The tension between householder masculinity and the public position of priesthood was impossible to resolve.

This can be seen in other complaints about priests engaging in what their parishioners considered inappropriate economic activity. On the one hand beneficed clergy were obliged to seek a profit from the glebe land attached to their churches, in order to maintain their households and keep the chancel of the church in good repair.61 But on the other, clerics like the rector of Wainfleet All Saints, mentioned previously, who were criticized for taking on manual labor (digging de le turphes), were victims of a campaign for clerical purity, periodically orchestrated from the highest reaches of the church. One diocesan constitution aimed at distinguishing the clergy from the laity began with an injunction against performing “servile tasks” (opera servilia), and this disapproval seems to have been widely shared among parochial visitation jurymen. At Orcheston, Wiltshire, in 1394, the rector was reported for working in the fields (opera ruralia) until dusk on the eve of the feast of the Assumption, while in 1397 the chaplain of Leominster (Herefordshire) was said to be a “common dealer in animals and sheep, buying and selling at a profit.” The word “common” had the descriptive meaning of “habitual” as well as carrying a sense of disdain. We find it again in the complaint against the curate of Wootton, Oxfordshire, in 1519 that he was going to his sheep in the fields each day before celebrating Mass, that he had once been shoeing a horse when a parishioner came for confession, and that he was a “common buyer and seller of sheep and cattle.”62 Lay unease about clergy performing manual labor again refers to the mixing of secular and religious roles, both in terms of what the priest was actually doing with his body and a sense that if such tasks were necessary, the hours devoted to them ought to be clearly separated from liturgical or sacramental time. A priest whose income was too much derived from inappropriate sources might be said to “live in the style of a layman,” and thus fail to fulfill the separate role carved out for him during the reform era.63 Recalling that visitations were disciplinary exercises involving the laity as well as bishops, such comments ought to be interpreted as bottom-up, as well as top-down, demands that the clergy be a distinct social group. In all such complaints, unpriestly behavior was understood as that which failed to meet specifically clerical standards of masculinity.

As well as being judged for carrying out tasks that were unpriestly, the parish clergy were frequently suspected of undue profiteering from the lands under their control. Visitation reports of such activity are usually fairly terse, but on occasion, the feelings behind them become a little clearer. For instance, in 1466 the jurors of Conduit Street in Lichfield reported their chaplain Thomas Styckebucke for “shamelessly” (temeritate) taking various offerings intended for the church, and spending them “for his own benefit, contrary to the law.”64 His alleged shamelessness and the reference to the law indicate an awareness on the part of the parishioners that this was an extreme case, but it does highlight the fine balance between the financial agency inherent to contemporary models of manhood and the sometimes-contrary pull of duty and responsibility. The former encouraged freedom and initiative, while the latter demanded selfless adherence to rules. Clerical manliness straddled both norms, uncomfortably.

Many complaints about the clergy’s economic initiatives seem to have been motivated by feelings of commercial injustice, for instance if a priest used the churchyard—land not available to the other parishioners—to graze his animals, to thresh and winnow his grain, or as a source of free stone or timber. This sense of unfairness arose from the clashing attitudes held toward priests as village householders and as public officeholders: the “man of the village” or “man of the church” in Jennifer Thibodeaux’s heuristic dyad.65 Complaints about animals in churchyards were often expressed in terms of “pollution” by excrement, but it is impossible to tell whether this was morally tinged disgust or simply an opportunistic way of taking economic grievances to a church tribunal.66 But however sincere the complaint, the values underlying them affected the clergy in the same way. By virtue of their position, they were subject to heightened levels of moral and economic scrutiny, making any pretense of being independent householders look fairly shaky.

If complaints about profiteering represent the denial of householder status to priests, reports that they failed to provide hospitality may seem to be its affirmation. Hospitality to the needy was a duty of the beneficed clergy, laid down in canon law and synodal statutes, and deeply embedded in public consciousness.67 According to Richard FitzRalph, the archbishop of Armagh, preaching a synodal sermon in 1355, priests who were less hospitable than they ought to be were of a kind with lecherous, drunken, and lazy clerics. Conversely, those who gave alms and “kept hospitality” were “doing good” and “pleasing to the angels.” One set of synodal statutes explicitly connected hospitality to a priest’s duty to keep a “decent” house and employ only “honest” servants, indicating the ways in which the different aspects of householder masculinity informed one another.68

Hospitality was a duty that priests shared with lords and some institutions, such as monasteries and hospitals, and it was explicitly gendered masculine, even when provided by female lords.69 This tells us not only that priests could be householders but that they were—whatever their actual wealth—numbered among a social group of some prestige. Such standing, however, came with social obligations, to the “bodily needs” of poor parishioners, to travelers, and to churchmen going about diocesan business.70 Expectations seem to have been calibrated to wealth, with one Lincolnshire rector being ordered by the bishop to reside in his parish and provide hospitality “according to the value of his benefice,” a qualification reflected in some synodal statutes on the subject.71 Obligation in this sense was not at all inimical to enjoying the status of an independent masculine head of household. Lords, after all, were expected to welcome guests and display “largesse,” with many founding hospitals in order to fulfil what was, by the thirteenth century, a widespread expectation.72 Such paternalism reconciled discretion, or “pleasure,” and obligation within the framework of an elite masculine model of behavior. Nonetheless, priests could find themselves disciplined on these grounds in a way that lords would not have experienced. 73

Because hospitality was not strictly a commercial transaction, it must have felt, for much of the time, like an act of generosity: a gift given of one’s own will. In the account book of Munden’s Chantry, mentioned previously, we find the warden and chaplains entertaining other priests and select laypersons on the basis of apparent friendship or mutual benefit. On one occasion in 1455, they provided dinner to the rector of Bridport, two prominent local laymen and their wives, and a local prior, before welcoming “many of the tenants and neighbors” for further entertainment. But the Bridport priests also provided meals for laborers working on the lands that funded their chantry and to travelers passing through the area on what seem to have been more obligatory terms.74 Generosity was tinged with duty, and we must presume it was the dereliction of this duty that so exercised the parishioners who made complaints. This did not happen in every visitation, by any means. Most occurrences in the sample used here come from the visitation of Lincoln Diocese in 1519, at a time when the profits of demesne agriculture were just beginning to recover from the plague-era slump.75 Thirty-one parishes, concentrated in Lincolnshire and Oxfordshire, reported a vicar or rector for failing to provide hospitality. However, we also find evidence of the expectations surrounding hospitality in other dioceses. The register of the dean of Salisbury, recording his visitation of appropriated churches and prebends in the early fifteenth century, noted with approval how two clerics provided the dean’s party with a “splendid” meal, adding that this was done “courteously,” language that recalls the connection between lordship and hospitality. In Archbishop Warham’s visitation of Kent in 1511–12, the parishioners of Charlton complained that the rector, Thomas Chosell, “kepithe noo residence nor hospitalitie amongs his parisshones, nor commethe but seldome amongs theym.”76 As these two instances demonstrate, the demand for hospitality could come from above as well as from below, a fact that emphasizes the simultaneously superior and subordinate position occupied by parish clergymen.

The Clergy and Their Female Companions

Historians of clerical sexuality and gender identity have taken subtly different positions on the importance of celibacy, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Derek Neal’s position, that celibacy was the “essence of manliness” for the clergy, countered the idea that sexual renunciation meant a rejection of masculinity. But Jennifer Thibodeaux believes that the parish clergy “eschewed the religious manliness advocated by the church in favor of a secular manliness that gave them masculine status in their villages.” Similarly, Michelle Armstrong-Partida has argued that celibacy was not part of clerical identity but merely something demanded by the ecclesiastical authorities.77 Whereas Thibodeaux contends that priests adopted lay standards of behavior in order to function as “men of the village” and Armstrong-Partida finds that the parish clergy rejected the canonical expectation of celibacy, Neal argues that they could only be regarded as true men (in control of themselves) if they lived up to the standards of celibacy: relations with the other villagers were harmed, not helped, by adopting a lay lifestyle. This is also how Tiffany Vann Sprecher read the fifteenth-century evidence from the diocese of Paris, concluding that the church authorities used lay “aggression” against clerical concubinage as a means to enforce synodal statutes.78 Both ways of reading the evidence seem persuasive to me, and although there are no clear chronological or regional trends within the English evidence, it seems likely that priests and their parishioners interpreted clerical sexuality in different ways at different times.

As we see in chapter 3, a great many priests lived openly with women and were only disciplined spasmodically. It was comparatively rare for a beneficed priest to be thrown out of his living for sexual immorality, but the occasional enforcement of disseisin—such as the exclusion of the rector of North Kilworth in 1518 for adultery and fornication—together with the very commonplace use of visitations to exert social pressure were probably enough to maintain a latent feeling of surveillance and regulation. When we add to this the influence of preaching, moralizing literature, and the promulgation of statutes against clerical concubines, it becomes clear that sexual continence was an inescapable standard for all clergy, however they lived and whatever the reaction of their parishioners.79

Bearing out Derek Neal’s suggestion that sexuality was bound up with all aspects of the self, the Northern Homily Cycle reveals much about the ways in which clerical masculinity was connected to the twin themes of the present book: female influence and church governance. In a passage intended for use by preachers persuading people of the need for confession, the Cycle author tells the story of a “holy priest” whose earthly affections led to sin before he repented and received God’s mercy. Two affections frame the story. The priest dearly loved a male friend who was, we are told, married to a good woman. That couple had a daughter, but when both parents died during the child’s infancy, the priest took her in and brought her up, out of love for his dead friend. The girl became indispensable to the priest’s household (I mention this example in the previous chapter), carrying the keys of the house in a symbol of feminine authority. Issuing a commonplace denunciation of the priest living with a woman—he was “foolish”—the Cycle author relates how lust entered their relationship at the instigation of the devil, and how they sinned together.80 Straightaway afterward, the priest was full of shame and repentance, and the homily diverts into an extended explanation of the need for full confession.

To understand this homily’s conception of clerical masculinity, moral danger, and the place of women in the church, we have to look beyond the central device of an individual priest’s sin and repentance to two other anxieties buried in the story. First, while the young woman is meant to symbolize moral danger, there is no mention of her sexual attractiveness. Lust is treated simply as the inevitable outcome of cohabitation with a woman. The only detail that hints at the danger coming from her, rather than originating with the priest’s lack of self-control, is her importance to his household, symbolized by her carrying the rectory keys. The danger of women is, then, presented not so much as the lust arising from original sin, but as the influence they could wield from their positions within clerical households. We might go so far as to say that for this writer, the lapse in a priest’s chastity was merely the outcome of allowing female influence to flourish, unguarded.

The second essential element of the story, in terms of its gender politics, is the origin of the priest’s catastrophic worldly entanglements in his love for a male friend: “Mikil lufe was thaim bitwene, / And that was on thaire dedis sene.” Loving masculine friendships were part of the late medieval and early modern social fabric to an extent that is no longer generally found. In Alan Bray’s influential 2003 study, intense and meaningful same-sex friendships were, for the most part, regarded by contemporaries as arising from and contributing to virtue (in all its senses), but Bray also detected a capacity for such relationships to be turned against their participants with veiled intimations of sodomy.81 While there does not seem to be any hint of such suspicion in the Northern Homily Cycle, it is notable that the priest’s capitulation to lust and the devil is the outcome of a sequence of events that began in a loving homosocial friendship. If the priest had not felt beholden to his deceased friend, he would not have taken the man’s daughter into his household, and the supposedly inevitable sexual sin would not have occurred. When the homily’s homosocial love is placed in the foreground like this, the whole tale can be read as a warning against any involvement with “the village” as opposed to the church. This is not to say that all homosocial relations were suspect: in fact, the strength of such bonds between clerics was one cultural bulwark against the influence of women on the parish, and as we see in chapter 1, it was ritualized and stylized for the purposes of governance.82 Churchmen were, however, supposed to be free from secular influence, and devoting the goods of the church to however charitable a purpose when the motivation was love for a layman, is cast as undermining the priest’s salvation and purpose.

This short homily indicates that standards of masculine behavior were not simply used to judge individual priests but were promulgated for other reasons: maintaining proper governance in the church and excluding women from influence within the parish. Complaints about priests’ sexual behavior were common. Of the 2,389 reports of clerical malfeasance in the visitations sample, 390 (16%) were concerned with sexual behavior while 215 (9%) targeted domestic arrangements involving women. Naturally there was some overlap between these categories: 58 complaints about clergy living with women make explicit mention of sexual behavior as well. There must have been suspicion in many more cases, but the fact is the two things were not exactly synonymous. Sometimes the uncertainty was explicit, as in the 1397 report at Llandinabo (Herefordshire), where the parishioners said that the rector lived with his former concubine but did not know whether the two sinned together.83

The largest sustained campaign against women in priests’ houses, within the sample, was that undertaken by Bishop Atwater of Lincoln between 1517 and 1519, discussed in chapter 3 in relation to the lives of servants and family members. Two aspects of its discipline are worth our attention here. First, it is notable that while the personnel, and presumably the agenda, of visitation were more or less consistent across the whole diocese, reports of the clergy living with women were concentrated in the archdeaconry of Lincoln and one deanery of the archdeaconry of Buckingham. It would be odd if priests in Oxfordshire or Hertfordshire had not employed female servants or lived with their mothers or sisters, and indeed there are isolated examples to show that they did. Such variation in the record indicates that not all parish representatives felt alike about the visitor’s agenda. Some may have resisted saying anything at all about a situation they found perfectly acceptable. This speculation is strengthened by the fact that when parishioners did report the women living in clerical households, they often added an opinion as to whether the women were “suspected” or “not suspected.” Priests living with certain women was clearly perfectly acceptable to many laypeople, despite what canon law said on the matter.

A difficult category was made up of parish clerks. There are twenty-one reports of parish clerks living with women (and a further forty-eight were noted for illicit sexual relations with women) in the whole visitation sample. Clerks, sometimes known by their earlier title “holy water clerks,” carried out menial tasks in the church, such as ringing the bells, as well as assisting the priests during church services. In the later Middle Ages they were almost always laymen or in minor clerical orders, which did not require a vow of celibacy. However, the canonist William Lyndwood entered into some discussion about the status of holy water clerks, saying they might sometimes be counted as clerics and sometimes as laymen. If, for example, a clerk had married twice, he was to be counted a layman. But if he had married only once and afterward been ordained, he was to be considered a cleric. Lyndwood was thinking primarily about “benefit of clergy” and whether someone should be subject to the authority of secular or spiritual courts.84 He was notably uninterested in what might happen to a clerk’s wife or children once he received holy orders. But the point is that Lyndwood thought the distinction was clear. Similarly, the author of the Quattuor Sermones, also writing in the fifteenth century, made a careful distinction between the ordained and nonordained clergy. The former, made up of bishops, priests, and deacons would be damned for misbehavior—such as sexual incontinence—that was treated more indulgently when found in subdeacons and clerks. This latter category of clergy was grouped with the “lewd” or laity.85 However, it is not at all clear that this distinction between lay and clerical parish clerks was understood or accepted in practice.

Sometimes the distinction is hinted at. For instance, when the clerk of Saltfleet Haven in Lincolnshire was reported for holding a woman called Galiana “wrongly as a wife” (male teneret ut uxorem) in 1340, the stress on “wrongly” indicates a vague awareness that it was possible for clerks to marry “correctly.”86 Uncertainty dogs our interpretation of the evidence found elsewhere. During Bishop Waltham’s visitations of Salisbury Diocese in 1391 and 1394, for example, some reports simply note the fact that a parish clerk was married; one resulted in a clerk being summoned to explain why he should not be removed; and in four cases, the bishop determined that a clerk should leave his office.87 These may represent successive stages of information gathering, assessment of the facts, and action against those unlawfully married, but there is no indication that ambiguity of status was being addressed at all by the visitor. One gets the sense that parish clerks were simply being lumped together with the clergy at large.

As noted in the previous chapter, a scenario commonly arose in which a married clerk proceeded into major holy orders and sought to repudiate his wife or claim that he had never been married. This happened at Kidlington in Oxfordshire in 1518, where the parishioners protested that a clerk had taken holy orders despite already being married. Such cases were likely to have encouraged parishioners to treat all men serving in their church as clergy, and to subject them to broadly similar moral judgements. In this way the cumulative effect of involving the laity in the regulation of clerical lives was to entrench certain assumptions and standards, whatever the complexity of the lived reality and the ragged edges of the law. Reading between the lines, when a visitation book simply records that a clerk was married—as happened often in Dean Chandler’s visitation of Salisbury Cathedral’s appropriated parishes in 1405—there may have been no direct disciplinary consequence, but it is possible to see the record itself as a form of discipline, reminding the clerks of the constraints under which they lived sexually active married lives, and advertising to the laity that the boundaries of clerical celibacy were to be policed at all times.88 This was an important plank of the gendered system of control by which the whole clerical estate was managed. Its disciplinary force was certainly felt by the men subjected to it, but as I have noted many times already, we must not forget its much more momentous historical consequences for women. If the sexual standards by which parish clerks were judged revolved around the masculine category of husband, women were excluded by default, without a word needing to be said on the matter.

This point applies with even greater force to the more frequent complaints about the sexual activity of priests in major orders. There was no ambiguity in the law where priests were concerned: they could not marry and were expected to be celibate. It is instructive to begin with an unusual visitation account of the clergy behaving well. At some point between 1336 and 1349, the jurors of an unidentifiable parish subject to the dean and chapter of Lincoln submitted a written statement on a small slip of parchment: “The jurors say that the vicar and all the chaplains conduct themselves well (bene se habent) with no adulterous embraces or fornications.”89 The reflexive verb habere se implies self-control: to conduct, hold, or bear oneself well. Visitation records demonstrate that failures of self-control could be harshly judged.

Many reports of sexual misbehavior were couched in terms of suspicion, because concrete evidence was hard to come by. But although there were rarely eyewitnesses to the events in question, parishioners’ surveillance could be intrusive. References to a woman being in the priest’s house “day and night” or being visited “many times” were common.90 Sometimes the time of day (or night) was enough to arouse suspicion, with reference to visits at “illicit and indecent” hours. Some reports seem to have rested on detailed information gathering or gossip. In one report from Ramsbury, Wiltshire, in 1409 the parishioners said that the vicar had allowed the rector of Milton Lilbourne (about seven miles away) to use his house for sexual encounters with a woman from Marlborough (about four miles away). Another from Lichfield in 1466 accused the chaplain John Freeman of behaving suspiciously with Katerina Johnson: the jurors knew whose servant she was and also identified two third-party houses in which they met. In addition, news of his behavior had been “publicly broadcast.”91 Even if the complaints arising from parishioner surveillance were not upheld, the knowledge that they were under observation and liable to be reported and possibly disciplined must have exerted a good deal of pressure on some priests. Others remained flagrant, perhaps defiant, such as the curate of Wraysbury in Buckinghamshire who was reported for fornication in 1518 and 1520 having continued to sin with the same woman, apparently “with impunity.”92

Assumptions about the maleness of the clergy, which by default excluded women, were perpetuated in the words used in visitation reports. Here I draw particular attention to the verbs to know and to keep and to the adjective boldly.

The vast majority of visitation reports about sexual immorality involving clergy placed the man in the active role. He, the priest, was usually accused of incontinence with her, the female parishioner. Quite often this was expressed using the verb cognovere, to know. At Cradley in Herefordshire the parishioners complained in 1397 that their chaplain had regularly committed adultery with Alice Hacket, “knowing her many times” in a house in the churchyard. He “knew” her: the word order is significant, positioning the man as subject and the woman as object: the one active, the other passive. In both academic medical discourse and litigation on marriage, it was deemed appropriate for men to take an active—and women, a passive—role in coitus.93 But we are not dealing with approval of proper gender roles here. The offending priest conforms to one expectation (the active role) while flouting another (self-control). It disciplines him according to a slippery code of masculinity.

A second way in which delinquent priests were defined and undermined as men was in the language used to describe the way they lived with their female companions, as outlined in chapter 3. Often priests were said to “keep” or “hold” (tenere) women, either in their home or elsewhere.94 As Ruth Karras explained in a pioneering article for this field of research, tenere could imply a priest’s financial maintenance of his companion, providing her “keep” as it were. But some relationships described by this verb seem to have been purely sexual, not quasi-marriages. In those cases, the meaning of tenere may have been closer to “holds to” or “is bound to” in an emotional sense. The implications of these two possibilities for gender identity point in opposite directions. To keep a woman in the sense of maintaining her financially conformed with patriarchal norms surrounding the masculine control of property and dependents. Indeed, as Janelle Werner has pointed out, tenere was the verb usually applied to the ownership or possession of land, indicating “the economically dominant and socially responsible head of a domestic unit.” In this sense, priests who kept female companions undermined normative clerical masculinity while meeting the requirements of married lay householder status. However, priests who “held to” a woman in the sense of being emotionally beholden to her, and under her sway, embodied the destabilization of all gender norms: a man should have sufficient self-control not to be under the sway of a woman. To be seduced was a sign of weakness or effeminacy.95 Tenere was a capacious word in the late Middle Ages, used fairly unreflectively in many different contexts. Its meaning in a hastily compiled visitation record could carry a degree of ambiguity. While it is impossible, therefore, to use such documents to comment on how a particular man felt about or experienced a relationship, or to know for certain what impression the scribe or visitor intended to convey, for our purposes the important thing to note is the unconscious force of language in sustaining the assumption that however a priest failed, he failed as a man.

Departure from universal norms of masculinity, not just sliding away from the specifically clerical expectation of celibacy toward a lay model of manhood, was also signaled in other ways. Just as priests could be sanctioned when they gave in to their own will or “pleasure” in the performance of church services (as previously discussed), the way they formed illicit relationships was also sometimes expressed in terms of the misapplication of the will. For instance, at Challock in Kent it was said that a priest called Richard Garford “kepithe a woman yn boldely that alle the parisshe wille report.” In this case the sense of “keep” seems clear: Garford maintained a woman in his home. More interesting, because more ambiguous, is the word “boldely.” Boldness was a see-saw characteristic in Middle English, being associated with masculine virtues such as courage, strength, and sturdiness, but also capable of meaning rash, brazen, presumptuous, or unrestrained. It had this duality because it described the way in which something was willed or intended. The will could be a tool of virtue, if it was directed to the good, but it was also the root of sin, if directed toward the bad.96 Since keeping a woman in a priest’s house was proscribed as a sin, the confidence or openness with which it was done was read as brazen disregard for proper conduct. It was unrestrained and unmanly. This sense appeared in one other report to Warham’s 1511 visitation of Kent, in a complaint about the rector of Wootton who “berithe himself bold upon my lords grace” if anyone approached him about his failings.97 This meant that he would presumptuously look for the archbishop’s favor and protection if he was criticized. Being overconfident was, in this case, paradoxically associated with being too reliant on a position within the church hierarchy: here was a priest who was unmanly because he could not take responsibility for himself.

Whether the clergy were disciplined because they breached the rules on celibacy, because the laity feared the sexual license of the unmarried priest, or because they were being pursued opportunistically on account of grudges and disputes, they were disciplined as men. Furthermore, whether they were judged to have exerted their will too much or too little in their sexual behavior, they were judged as men. Every time, therefore, a cleric was reported for sexual offenses, gender-based assumptions were stirred up, entrenching masculine standards of self-control as the mark by which priests were defined. Once again, women were disqualified by default.

The Clergy’s Social Behavior

Besides using visitation to discipline clerical sexuality, late medieval parishioners collaborated in the institutional church’s ambition to police other aspects of the behavior of priests. These were issues of deportment, such as how they regulated their bodies, voices, and dress, as well as “hedonistic” behaviors, such as drinking, gambling, and fighting.98 We can classify all these as forms of “social behavior” in having to do with the manner in which the clergy interacted with, and set an example for, the rest of society. They were matters of widespread debate. Synodal statutes proclaimed that “the life of clerics ought to be an example and instruction to lay people,” and preachers similarly taught that priests “should be examples of patience and holiness for the people.” Parishioners who wished to mold the behavior of their clergy drew on this widely known expectation, for instance by saying that an errant priest “gevithe ille ensample to many.”99 Just as in matters of sexuality and household governance, we find the clergy simultaneously elevated and obligated in terms that were distinctly gendered, their position of power and influence destabilized through subjection to discipline from above and from below.

For the men who ruled the church as bishops, the parish clergy had to be distinguished from laypeople and from women. Without these two distinctions, they would have lacked credibility as enactors of God’s sacramental miracles, and the fictional equality of the clergy—shown in chapter 1 to have been essential to the government of the church—would have been impossible to maintain. Priests, according to the preacher Robert Rypon (c. 1350-c. 1421), ought not to be false, malicious, or impure; they should avoid the company of women; be restrained in their dress, gestures, and speech; and avoid drinking in taverns and playing dice. The point was that they should be not just distinct but discernibly distinct from laypeople and from women. Richard FitzRalph (c. 1299–1360) claimed that among priests “some are lechers, others are drunkards, others are lazy, others are too much like laypeople,” while an anonymous fifteenth-century preacher complained that priests have “no religion in their dress, no temperance in their food, nor modesty in the signs they give nor even self-control in their deeds. . . . Many are like laymen in gathering worldly riches, like merchants in having all sorts of dealings; many are like knights in the luxury of their garments and like women in the inconstancy of their minds.”100

In this view of the church, laymen and (especially) women were cast down—indiscriminately and unjustly—as hopelessly irreligious, intemperate, immodest, without self-control, avaricious, and inconstant. The clergy were, meanwhile, raised up and held to an opposite and unrealistic standard. To slide from the ethic was to be unpriestly and unmanly. How ironic then that it was the reprobate laity—admittedly not women, that would have been unthinkable—to whom bishops turned when they wanted to move beyond general admonition to discover the failings of particular clergymen. Parish representatives obliged, reporting their priests for a wide range of offenses. But compared with sacramental duties, economic and householder activities, and sexual behavior, these forms of clerical behavior were numerically less important to late medieval parish representatives. Such offenses together accounted for only 183 out of 2,389 visitation complaints, or 8 percent of the total. However, their importance to understanding the gendered culture of church governance and the parish clergy is disproportionate to this. That is so because visitation reporting allowed for terse, yet still revealing, descriptions of behavior to enter the record. Some were, admittedly, rather imprecise, such as the 1511 report that a parish clerk in Kent was “not of goode behavour nor fame, nor he lyvith not as a clerk aughte to doo,” or that clergy in late fourteenth-century Herefordshire were simply “unsuitable” or “inadequate” for the office they held.101 Other reports, however, mark more clearly the tacit assumptions animating gender politics in the medieval parish.102

Priests were required to model equanimity and balance in their character and behavior, being neither too heated and rash, nor too cool and indecisive. Cognitive and emotional control was required to achieve this, but as with criticisms about the conduct of divine services we often find it being expressed in bodily terms. There is a strong sense that the undisciplined clerical body was out of control, and that this arose from a failure of the will. The visitation of Wantage, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), in 1408 received a report about the chaplain John Frere, who “frequents taverns and plays quoits and such like, disgracefully making a spectacle of his body.” In 1470s Northamptonshire a chaplain who failed in his duty to carry the oil and chrism for church services provoked similar ire because his religious duties were visibly contrasted with his penchant for “jokes and frivolities.” This finds an echo in the words of a contemporaneous preacher for whom unruly priests were “showmen” in their gestures and “scoundrels” in their behavior.103 A lack of self-control led to the body being interpreted as a spectacle or a disgrace. The idea that an absence of rational intent would lead to uncontrolled motions of the body also lies behind a 1229 injunction against “wandering about at night without good reason.” Good reasons were the fulfilment of priestly duties, like visiting the sick, indicating that virtuous intent was equated with role-fulfilment and undisciplined wandering was seen to result as much from a weak will as from a misdirected strong will.104 Weakness of the will was gendered feminine, making it essential that the good priest was first a good man.

Like the body and the voice, dress was widely seen as an expression of character and gendered role fulfilment. Some synodal statutes explained that dressing appropriately, not in lay fashions, was intended to help priests avoid the sin of pride (superbia) and to present an example of humility to the laity. Others stressed the need to distinguish clergy from laity. Priests were reported for wearing purses like laymen, belting their jackets too tightly, wearing an “unpriestly” doublet while carrying a bow and arrows, and for excessive adherence to lay fashions. In 1466 parishioners in Lichfield testified that William Gunner, clerk of the parochial chapel of the Blessed Mary, does not “behave as a cleric [should], but presents himself sumptuously with pointed slippers, well-groomed hair which was excessively loose or spidery, and with a proud face” (curiose se habet cum rostris in sotularibus, nutrita coma et nimis laxata siue rona et cum vulto elato).105 Sumptuousness or curiositas implied a life of excess and a lack of chastity; in a sermon of 1372 William of Rimmington, the prior of Sawley in Yorkshire, spoke of priests’ dress and hairstyles in just these terms, and in 1498 Bishop Alcock’s sermon to the clergy of Ely Diocese advised that “if thou se a preest go lyke a lay man, with his typpet, slyppers and grete sleves, it is to presume that he repenteth hym that ever he forsoke the habyte of a layeman and therfore useth it.”106

To be a good priest was therefore to be unlike a layman and also unlike a woman. In terms of appearance, this meant, principally, the way that the head and especially hair were presented. Not only should priests avoid well-groomed “loose and spidery” hair, they should have a proper tonsure—that is the crown of their head ought to be visibly shaved in a circle “as falls to their estate in holy church.”107 A priest suspected of failing in any way might meet with insults relating to his tonsure. In 1523, a priest in Norfolk made a reference to “polling” or shearing to call a clerical adversary a “false polling priest and a shaver.”108 This was a gendered insult. St. Bonaventure (1221–74) wrote that “no one has a capacity for [holy] orders who is not capable of a tonsure,” adding that women—whose heads were expected to be covered by a scarf—were incapable in this regard.109 Besides providing differentiation between clergy and laity, therefore, the requirement for a visible tonsure was a marker of the exclusive masculinity of the clergy. This tacit inference, which structured all thinking about the correct sex of parish priests, was grounded in St. Paul’s remark in 1 Corinthians 11:6 that it was “shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven.”

An example from the visitation evidence makes this plain. In 1511, the parishioners of Warhone in Kent complained about the absence of their rector, who was paying an unsuitable canon, “in all his lewdnes,” to minister to them. This canon had refused to come into the choir of the church and was seen hanging about the chancel door “hatted and wrapped” (hattid and rappid). So far as visitation reports go this is rather unusual, but it reveals an essential truth about the implicit gendering of clerical status: an uncovered head was essential to clerical status. It was, as Robert Mills has written, “a crucial signifier in the distribution of power, authority and language in medieval culture.”110 The Warhone case is an example of what we today would call indirect discrimination: although women were not specified (or even thought of) in this remark, they were excluded by it. Women could not, after all, bare their heads in public at all.

Just as a priest’s deportment and appearance provided parishioners with several highly gendered means to discipline or attack him, so too did his sociability within the village. A charge that commonly appears among complaints against unpopular clergy was that he spent his time in taverns, drinking. For example, the vicar of Ashby Magna in Leicestershire was accused in 1413 of being incontinent with a woman whom he kept in his house, of allowing his animals to foul the churchyard, of being often away from the parish, and of frequenting taverns. Laypeople feeling the neglect of an inattentive priest might complain that he spent more time in the alehouse than in caring for his flock or that he was there “talking and drinking beyond honest hours.”111 For the bishops and papal legates who drafted statutes regulating the conduct of clergy, drinking was a danger associated with the worst excesses of lay society, encouraging lust and violence. Visitation complaints similarly linked drinking to its effects: one priest was “quarrelsome and drunk”; another’s “vile drunkenness” meant he could not sing well in church; the “disgraceful” inebriation of a third meant he sometimes took services too quickly, sometimes too slowly; and the apparent alcoholism of a fourth had led to his pawning a liturgical book in the tavern, hardly ever taking services in church, being incapable of visiting the sick, making trouble between his neighbors, and failing to keep his rectory in good repair.112

Drink was clearly thought to compromise the self-control expected of the clergy, in areas from sacramental performance to their householder responsibilities. As a result, some synodal statutes recommended avoiding public celebrations and taverns entirely, since drunkenness spelled “damnation and eternal death,” while others allowed that clerics might attend gatherings hosted by respectable people, so long as they held themselves (se habeant) soberly, modestly and respectably, and were sure to leave sober and early.113 The centrality of self-control, that ubiquitous marker of successful masculinity, is plain to see here, indicating yet another sphere in which the discipline exerted by visitation reinforced the maleness of the parish clergy whether they were praised or blamed for their behavior. As with the matter of clerical dress, this was also a question of respecting the difference between the sacred and the profane, showing how the lay-clerical divide was shored up by a gender hierarchy.114

A related sphere of sociability was games and gambling. From the thirteenth century onward, playing dice or any form of gambling was forbidden to priests, as was participation in popular festivals and “games” at Mayday or the autumn equinox.115 The reasons for this had again to do with bodily deportment, setting an example, distinguishing clergy from laity, and excluding female influence. All of this can be read in the 1496 case of the parish chaplain of Hartlebury in Worcestershire, who was reported for playing dice with various male and female parishioners, getting into fights and causing quarrels. His behavior was thought undignified for a man in holy orders, liable to be a negative influence on others, and to blur the social boundaries between a priest and his parishioners. He was told by the visitor that “he should not play dice for as long as he celebrates divine service within his jurisdiction.”116 As we have seen, divine services required a priest who was composed and self-possessed, neither too hasty nor too sluggish. Gambling, along with drinking, was taken to be a sure sign of someone who did not possess such masculine self-control.

Perhaps the most important demonstration that a priest could not control himself appropriately was quarreling and fighting. While priests were expected to have sufficient will to carry out their duties with purpose and intention, an excess of humoral heat could lead to behavior that visitors and parishioners sometimes chose to condemn. Carrying weapons was forbidden to the clergy, unless it was necessary to defend the church during a time of war, a caveat that—as Derek Neal has shown—injected greater ambiguity into popular expectations during the period of the Hundred Years War.117 Nevertheless, it continued to feature in some visitation reports of that era. For instance, at Cradley in Herefordshire, parishioners reported in 1397 that two chaplains were in the habit of going about the parish at night, carrying arms, and disturbing the parishioners “contrary to the dignity of the church.”118

The expectation that clergy should not bear arms was implicitly gendered in both synodal statutes and visitations. Sometimes, as in the 1240 statutes of Worcester Diocese, it was presented as a means of avoiding the “turbulence” of anger and quarrels. Such uncontrolled emotion, associated quite commonly with unmanly behavior, was likewise invoked in visitation complaints about violence. For example, at Charlton (Kent) in 1511, the rector was said to be “full of malice and ready to fight” whenever challenged about his shortcomings. This was not the measured and reasonable behavior held up as the marker of the virtuous, male, priest. Forgoing arms was, furthermore, rationalized as an essential part of the clergy’s duty to follow the example of Christ, the ideal man. This allusion was made in diocesan statutes for the diocese of Bath and Wells around 1258 and by the papal legate to England, Ottobono, in 1268.119 The negation of Christ’s example is never referred to directly in visitations, but it may have been part of the unspoken mental baggage lying behind the rather common references to arms bearing being “improper,” “not fitting,” “contrary to clerical decency,” “unpriestly,” and “not peaceable.”120 Decency and propriety are always hard to define, but this is what makes them so useful as rhetorical ploys. They must always draw on a hinterland of tacit knowledge, in this case the role of Christ in defining the standards for clerical behavior: manly but peaceful.

Accusations that clergy were violently out of control seem to have drawn parish representatives to offer slightly more explanation of their grievances than was the case with other offenses. Sometimes this linguistic repertoire of discipline was subtly gendered, weaving concepts of masculinity together with ideas about sin, character, and the mind. Grievances against the chaplain of Beidon in Ramsbury (Wiltshire) are a case in point, combining allusions to traits considered feminine with hints at a failure of manliness. The chaplain was, so the parish representatives said, an adulterer and a “common” or habitual gossip. He was the sort of man to stir up trouble between the parishioners rather than quell discord, as he should, and in particular, he was constantly threatening to beat up one of his parishioners “without cause.”121 The absence of restraint caused the chaplain to start arguments, make threats, and act out an inappropriate sexuality. Extreme or disproportionate emotion featured in other visitation reports. At Barfreston, Kent, in 1511, parishioners protested that the rector Henry Tankard was “very malicious amongs us, and in his angre . . . denyethe us holy brede and holy water.” Here the difficulty posed by a priest’s untrammeled passion was associated with interruptions to the conduct of church services, which may have been mentioned to secure the visitor’s attention. But clearly the driving force of the complaint was the weariness engendered in the whole parish by their rector’s character. The report goes on to explain that the rector “troblithe uncharitably his parisshons with writs of surety of peace and the lyke.” A writ of surety of peace was a legal document secured in the royal Chancery, by which one party demanded the good behavior of another under threat of a financial penalty.122 A rector who felt his parishioners were not doing as they ought had at his disposal many options short of this for finding consensus or settling a dispute. “He is soo malicious and rigorows,” they grumbled. “Rigor” indicated his use of the law where normal face-to-face discussion seemed more warranted, while the reference to malice ties together Tankard’s excess of anger and his lack of charity, which were making his parishioners’ lives a misery. His “malice” continued in extorting more than he was owed in tithes, something that caused a few parishioners to leave Barfreston entirely. While he did not resort to physical violence, the extremity of this priest’s behavior was presented nonetheless as born of an unbalanced constitution, causing him to go too far in all that he did. Such immoderation was routinely expected in women, but in men, it was a failure of character.

A further case heard in the 1511 visitation of Kent, in the parish of Dover St. James, revolved around yet another unruly rector, a man of “prowde mynde,” whose attitude toward the archbishop—who was not only the visitor, but also the patron of this church—allegedly revealed a failure of masculine self-control. On his annual visit, the archbishop sought to have a sermon preached from the pulpit. When he had last tried to do this, the rector had run “violently” toward the preacher, before tearing the vestments off his back “like a mad man.”123 Loss of reason was, in this report, closely linked to a departure from the rational composure expected of all men. Such terse formulations in visitation records—whether the words came from the visitor or the parish representatives, or whether they reflect a combined agency—shaped the ways in which the parish clergy were seen by those above them in the church hierarchy, those beneath them as lay parishioners, and very probably by the clergy themselves.

Two things resulted from the ease with which such behavioral assumptions were imposed on the parish clergy. First, the recurrent propensity for emotions to run high and for priests to fail both by the general standards of late medieval masculinity and by specific expectations held of the clergy, provided bishops and their local lay collaborators with a multitude of means by which to keep rectors, vicars, chaplains, and clerks under some sort of control: a form of authority that “guarantees the failure of the tasks it commands,” in Judith Butler’s words.124 The governance of parishes by bishops would have been far more difficult had it not been based on the impossibility of perfect accordance with contemporary gender ethics. Second, without any conscious effort to labor the point of clerical maleness, the way in which all clerical behavior, good and bad, was gendered masculine meant that the very idea of female influence within the parish was pushed off the agenda. In Steven Lukes’s terms, the ability of bishops and parochial “trustworthy men” to set the disciplinary agenda and define its linguistic terms, constituted a form of deep ideological power. It could not easily be challenged, because it made no explicit claim. It was buried in the very structures of thought, language, and documentary record.125

The inevitable inadequacies of the parish clergy according to the contradictory masculine standards surveyed in this chapter were not just problems to be solved; they were opportunities to be taken. The vast numbers of parish clergy in every diocese—rectors and vicars, chaplains and deacons, the married parish clerks—were hard to control. Bishops had few formative (as opposed to drastic) sanctions at their disposal, but by enlisting the laity in the regulation of the clergy, they solved the church’s biggest problem of governance: subordinates’ lack of dependence on their superiors.

The rank-and-file parish clergy could not be cajoled and flattered with the promise of masculine equality and ritual friendship, which we observe in chapter 1 in episcopal commission letters. When it came to managing the parishes, suspicion was substituted for friendship, gender was used as the yardstick, and failure was instrumentalized as a tool of power. Suspicion from above and below kept the parish clergy on track and in check, but it was also the principal means by which the ghostly appearance of female influence was kept in abeyance. Since being a good cleric meant being a good man, the considerable female knowledge and initiative present in the typical parish—as explored in chapter 3—was suppressed and denied oxygen.

In the following chapter, we encounter further circumstances in which women’s capacity for authority was realized in the parish. For it was not just in the rectory or vicarage that women found vocation, duty, and fulfilment but sometimes also in the priest’s ordained place inside the church. Women put pressure on the sacerdotal role in the later Middle Ages. The evidence is fragmentary but sufficient to oblige us to ask how women were—for centuries—excluded from the priesthood.