burden was not to be laid on the clergy, that the marriage-bed was honourable and conjugal society was chastity. Subsequent early councils dealt with the same subject. There was no decree in the Greek Church against married bishops, presbyters or deacons, but in 692 the Council of Trullo made a difference between bishops and presbyters, allowing presbyters, deacons and all the inferior orders to cohabit with their wives after ordination.

The growth and influence of the monastic system, with its enforced rules of celibacy upon men and women, influenced the case of the secular clergy for many centuries. In the Anglo-Saxon period of Church history, the marriage of the clergy was quite common, and Gregory VII (Hildebrand) set his face sternly against this liberty. At a Synod of Rome in 1074 he passed a law forbidding the laity to avail themselves of the ministrations of the married priests. Lanfranc of Canterbury mitigated the severity of this rule at the Council of Winchester in 1076: while forbidding marriage to the regular clergy, he ordered that the priests in towns and villages should not be compelled to dismiss their wives, but that in the future no married man was to be ordained. The Council of Westminster in 1102, under Anselm, established an absolute rule of celibacy, which thus for the first time became the universal law of the English Church. For the next four hundred and fifty years this law was maintained with limited success. The marriage of the clergy in England

1 Canons of the Council of Westminster, A.D. 1102: "Celibacy of the Clergy," Sections 5-8

5. That no archdeacon, priest, deacon or canon may marry or retain a wife, and that any subdeacon who is not a canon, having married after the profession of chastity, be bound by the same rule.

6. That a priest, as long as he has illicit intercourse with a woman, be not lawful nor celebrate mass, and if he do so that his mass be not heard.

7. That none be ordained to the sub-diaconate or beyond without profession of chastity.

8. That sons of priests succeed not to their father's churches.

continued customary both with the parish priests and canons of collegiate churches. In 1107 Pope Pascal II wrote to Anselm to say that understanding that the majority of the English clergy are married, he grants authority to the archbishop to ordain their sons.

A council under Stephen Langton in 1222 decreed that clergy who retained their concubines should be deprived of their benefices, and in 1237 Otho, the papal legate, laid down rules to the same effect. Little, however, came of all this. The parish priests had not, like the monks, taken a vow of celibacy, and whilst ecclesiastical authority used the opprobrious name of concubine, the clergy lived with their wives, and the high-sounding penalties of synods were rarely enforced. When in 1129 Henry I was asked to enforce the canonical law, he merely used the opportunity to exact the payment of fees from the clergy for permission to retain their wives, and applied these to his own use. Down to the time of the Reformation the celibacy of the secular clergy was not rigorously enforced in England, and Parliament never intervened until the reign of Henry VII, when an act was passed giving the bishops greater power to deal with the incontinency of priests and religious men, though the act does not name marriage as an evidence of incontinency.

Without inquiring further into the long history of clerical wives or concubines, or of the fees paid by the clergy for permission to live with them, we come on the eve of the Reformation to a pitiable story of evasion and secret sanction by ecclesiastical authority. In 1452 the clergy in Wales addressed the following request to the Bishop of St. David's, De la Bere: "My lord Bishop,-We priests of your diocese, led by the fear of God and dread of eternal future punishment to sinners, beseech your Fatherhood that by your pontifical authority you will make or compel our concubines to withdraw and be for ever separated from us and from our houses; for we hope and beseech you that they may be so separated from us by your authority that we may never again have occasion to sin with them nor they by

us cohabiting with them." The Bishop replied: "I will not grant that your concubines be separated, or forced to separate, from you or your houses; because then I, your Bishop, shall lose yearly 400 marks [equivalent to, over £3000 of present money] which I receive regularly for the concubines of priests; for of every one of several priests I receive yearly a noble or more for his concubine, and that sum thus yearly received to my purse mounts up to 400 marks a year; and therefore I do not wish them separated from you." Then the priests said to their bishop: "O Lord Bishop, we wish them to be separated from us, and the concubines themselves do not wish to be so, but wish to remain in our houses and feed upon our goods, will we ni we; and therefore, because we dare not expel them for fear of their friends who want them to remain with us, we beg that they may be separated by you, my Lord Bishop, from us and our houses." But the Bishop said: "No, I will not compel them to separate from you, for then I, your Bishop, shall lose much money every year." 1

This bishop of abominable memory is at all events brutally frank. And Gascoigne's testimony is that of a devout son of the English Church of pre-Reformation days, who gives this as one of many examples of intolerable abuses in England in the fifteenth century.

In 1521 Henry VIII issued a proclamation against the married clergy, and the document is important as an illustration of supremacy before the power of the Pope had been called in question: "The king's majesty, understanding that a few in number of this his realm, being priests, as well religious as other, have taken wives and married themselves, etc., his highness, in no wise minding that the generality of the clergy of this his realm should, with the example of such a few number of light persons, proceed to marriage, without a common consent of his highness and his realm, doth therefore strictly charge and command as well all and singular the said priests as have attempted marriages that be openly known, as all such as will presumptu

1 Rogers's Gascoigne, pp. 35, 36.

ously proceed to the same, that they nor any of them shall minister any sacrament, or other ministry mystical; nor have any office, dignity, cure, privilege, profit, or commodity heretofore accustomed and belonging to the clergy of this realm; but shall be utterly, after such marriages, expelled and deprived from the same. And that such as shall, after this proclamation, contrary to this commandment, of their presumptuous mind take wives and be married, shall run into his grace's indignation, and suffer further punishment and imprisonment at his grace's will and pleasure. Given this 16th day of November, in the thirteenth year of our reign." 1

99 3,4

It is difficult to believe that Henry VIII did not know that Archbishop Warham was a married man. This statement has been denied, but the evidence for it is contained in a letter of Erasmus to the Archbishop in which he alludes to the Archbishop's "sweet wife and most dear children." 2 There is nothing antecedently improbable in this story, as clerical marriages were then by no means common.' Cranmer himself, whose first wife died before his ordination, contracted a second marriage in 1532, and was consecrated archbishop the following year. This, of course, was before there had been any relaxation by ecclesiastical authority of the law of the national Church. In the King's Book of 1543, matrimony was left at liberty to all men save priests and others who of their free liberty have by vow advisedly made chosen the state of continency.

In 1547 Convocation agreed to the following: "That 1 Wilkins's Concilia, iii., 696.

2 Erasmi Opera, III., 1695.

3 Dean Hook, in his Lives of the Archbishops, vol. vi., p. 321, conjectures that the marriage was known to Wolsey and not to Henry VIII, and that the order of 1521 was issued at the Cardinal's instigation to hint to the Archbishop that he was in his power. He further suggests that herein we have one ground for the despotic influence which Wolsey exercised over the gentle Warham, whose letters to Wolsey contain expressions of gratitude for which it is difficult to account. From what we know of the characters of the two men this supposition is possible, but in the region of surmise any inference can be drawn.

* Strype's Cranmer, book i., chap. xviii.

all such canons, laws, statutes, decrees, usages and customs, heretofore made, had or used, that forbid any person to contract matrimony or condemn matrimony already contracted by any person, for any vow or promises of priesthood, chastity or widowhood, shall from henceforth cease, be utterly void, and of none effect." 1

In 32 Hen. VIII, cap. 10, an Act of Parliament was passed "for the moderation of the punishment of incontinency of priests and women offending with them," which was followed in 2 & 3 Edw. VI, cap. 21, by an act "to take away all positive laws made against marriage of priests." By this act every positive law and canon which stood against the marriage was repealed, and four years later, in 1553, the decisions of the Church as to the permission of the clergy to marry were embodied in a series of articles.

Queen Elizabeth, it is well known, never accepted with a whole heart the marriage of the bishops and clergy. She is reputed to have said to the wife of Archbishop Parker: "Madame I may not call you, Mistress I am ashamed to call you, but yet I thank you." In the injunctions of 1559 there are regulations concerning the marriage of the clergy, in which, after stating that there is no prohibition by the Word of God, nor any example of the primitive Church, but that the priests and ministers of the Church may lawfully marry; and yet that the lack of discreet and sober behaviour in many clergy in choosing their wives caused a remedy to be sought, it is ordered "that no manner of priest or deacon shall hereafter take to his wife any manner of woman without the advice and allowance first had upon good examination by the bishop of the same diocese." It was necessary, also, to obtain the permission of two Justices of the Peace of the shire where the woman lived, and also the goodwill of her parents. "And for the manner of marriages of any bishops, the same shall be allowed and approved by the metropolitan of the province, and also by such commissioners as the Queen's Majesty shall thereunto appoint."

1 Strype's Cranmer, book ii., chap. iv.