. CONTENTS PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE Part I.. i PAGE . . . .3 PARISH LIFE IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE GREAT PILLAGE Part II. .7 . . -35 THE PARISH PRIEST IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE II REFORMATION . . . . 75 III ROBBING GOD . . . . .123 IV THE CRY OF THE VILLAGES . . . -147 v vi CONTENTS V PAGE THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS . ., .183 VI DAVID AND JONATHAN . . .221 VII ADAM AND EVE . 231 VIII cu cu ., . . 2 39 MOLES . IX ....249 PREFACE T T THEN, some twenty years ago, the country living which I now hold was offered me by the kind friend to whom the patronage belonged, I accepted it with little hesitation, and I did so with my eyes open and not without counting the cost. I knew that in joining the ranks of the country clergy I was burning my ships no professional future before me. and that there was I have never regretted my decision. I have found an abiding joy and pride in doing my best for my people and studying them and their ways in the present, while trying to learn something about their forefathers and their ways in the past. viii PREFACE In my first volume entitled Arcady, for better for worse I gave the world the result of my observations upon men and things as I found them. I believe it was and is a faithful picture but there was nothing retrospective in it reaching further back than the first half of the eighteenth century. It so happened, however, that certain antiquarian tastes, which were born with me, led me into researches here and there which appeared to me to throw some new light upon mediaeval history. The discovery of the immense body of direct evidence which the Manor Court Rolls afford regarding the incidence of the great plague of 1349 the study of the Roughamcharters, which yielded such a minute insight into the life of a village community in the thirteenth century and the extraordinary find of a prosperous country parsons annual audit for the year ending Michaelmas, 1306, were instances of the fact that even in History there 1 The first two of these papers are printed in my Coming of the Friars the third inRandom Roamings. PREFACE ix are still many discoveries to be made, and also that some men are curiously fortunate in their finds. The essays in the present volume on Parish Life, as distinct from village life, and on the Parish Priest, as distinct from the country parson, are in great measure supplementary to or elucidatory of the earlier papers referred to. If it were at all probable that a re-arrangement of my writings should be undertaken, I should like to see these five or six papers on Mediaeval Parish history published in a volume by themselves, so only that I were permitted to add two more contributions on the same lines of research, supplementary to these earlier ones...