lowest, and especially in the clerical class, men travelled both
in England and abroad more than they did after the Befor-
mation had suspended religious intercommunion and destroyed
the usefulness of ecclesiastical Latin as a means of communi-
cation. For -clerks, if not for laymen also, every monastery
■was a hostelry, and the frequent intercourse with the papal
court had the effect of opening the clerical mind to wider
interests.

It would have been well if the moral and spiritual influence
of the clerical order had been equally good; but, whilst it is
necessary to guard against exaggerated and one-sided statements
upon these points, it cannot be denied that the proved abuses
of the class go far to counterbalance any hypothetical advan-
tages ascribed to its influence. The majority of the persons
ordained had neither cure of souls nor duty of preaching ; their
spiritual work was simply to say masses for the dead ; they
were'not drawn on by the necessities of self-culture either to
deeper study of divine truth or to the lessons which are derived'
from the obligation to instruct others ; and they lay under no
responsibility as bound to sympathise with and guide the weak.
The moral drawback on their usefulness was even more im-
portant, because it affected the whole class and not a mere
majority. By the necessity of celibacy they were cut off from
the interests of domestic life, relieved from the obligations to
labour for wives and families of their own, and thus left at
leisure for mischief of many sorts. Every town contained thus
a number of idle men, whose religious duties filled but a small
portion of their time, who had no secular responsibilities, and
whose standard of moral conduct was formed upon a very low
ideal. The history of clerical celibacy, in England as else-
where, is indeed tender ground; the benefits which it is
supposed to secure are the personal purity of the individual,
his separation from secular ways and interests, and his entire
devotion to the work of God and the church. But the results,
as legal and historical records show us, were very different.
Instead of personal purity, there is a long story of licenced
and unlicenced concubinage, and, appendant to it, much miscel-

XiX.]                 Clerical Influence.                   385

Ianeous profligacy and a general low tone of morality in the
very point that is supposed to be secured. Instead of separation
from secular work is found, in the higher class of the clergy,
entire devotion to the legal and political service of the country,
and in the lower class idleness and poverty as the alternative.
Instead of greater spirituality, there is greater frivolity. The
abuses of monastic life, great as they may occasionally have
been, sink into insignificance by the side of this evil, as an
occasional crime tells against the moral condition of a nation
far less fatally than the prevalence of a low morality. The
records of the spiritual courts of the middle ages remain in
such quantity and in such concord of testimony as to leave no
doubt of the facts ; among the laity as well as among the clergy,
of the towns and clerical centres, there existed an amount of
coarse vice which had no secrecy to screen it or prevent it from
spreading. The higher classes of the clergy were free from any Good ch_a-
general faults of the kind ; after the twelfth century, when the higher
many of the bishops were, if not married, at least the fathers
of semi-legitimate families, the episcopal character for morality
stands deservedly high ; bishop Burnell, the great minister of
Edward I, is perhaps an exception¹ ; but there is scarcely a
case of avowed or proved immorality on record until we reach
the very close of the middle ages, and there is no case of the
deprivation of a bishop for any such cause. The great abbots
were, with equally rare exceptions, men of high character. It
is in the obscurity of the smaller monasteries and in the self-
indulgent, unambitious, and ignorant ranks of the lowest clergy,
that we find the vices which called in the former class for
summary visitation and suppression, and in the latter for the
exercise of that disciplinary jurisdiction which did so much
to spread and perpetuate the evils which it was created to
cure. For the spiritual courts, whilst they imposed spiritual
penalties, recognised perfunctory purgations, and accepted pe-

ɪ Burnell is probably the bishop who had five sons, and against whom
archbishop Peckham attempted a prosecution in 1279; Wilk. Cone, ii 40.
He was Peckham’s personal rival, and one annalist who mentions' his
death in 1292 speaks of his ‘ Consanguineas, ne dicam filias ’ and ‘ nepotibus
suis seu filiɪs Ann. Dunstable, p. 373.                         ∙ ^r

VOL. in.                    C C

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