The language of the liturgy will always be a little different from the language of common speech, however carefully the drafters of ritual aim to make it understood by the people. It has in it a strand of poetry, and the nature of reverence carries inside itself a healthy dislike of bathos. Therefore: if ministers of a liturgy are expected to preach to the people, they will need instruction in how best to teach or to speak, not to mention education so that they have something to say and are not windbags. But even if a minister of a liturgy is not expected to preach, but is only there as voice to go through the set text, it will be done better if he does it with understanding; and therefore the minister will need the education to understand what is read, which in the western centuries where all this started would be in Latin. The minister also needs instruction on how not to drop the baby at baptism, and how to behave with a coffin, and what to do to a dying person. It is therefore expected that this will be an educated person, even if for much of the Middle Ages the sort of education for many ministers would be that which we should think specially appropriate to a sacristan rather than to a professional preacher. And since some such qualification was essential to do the job, bishops hardly liked to ordain persons who could not pass some sort of an educational test.

The works of that late fifth- or early sixth-century writer whom we know as Pseudo-Dionysius are among the most difficult and yet also the most influential and compelling of all patristic writings. The whole Dionysian corpus and the many important historical and theological questions which it raises have been the subject of many studies, and it would certainly be untrue to suggest that the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the subject of this communication, has been wholly neglected; but the work has only recently been made accessible in English, and only one or two recent studies have given serious attention to the central place which the liturgy and its symbolism (the main subject of the work) occupy in Dionysius’s dieology as a whole. A short study of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy may therefore serve a useful purpose, perhaps at least that of encouraging the reading–now that an English translation is available–of what is probably the most accessible and immediately attractive of works which have been described (but who can tell whether such a description is ever accurate?) as ‘famous but seldom-read’.

It was the example of some visiting parochial clergy that first inspired the young Wynfrith, later the missionary Boniface, to adopt the religious life. According to his hagiographer Willibald

It is a cliché of medieval ecclesiastical history that the clergy was a ‘hierarchy’. When we use this term, we may mean ‘priesdy rule’, but more often we are referring to the way in which the clergy was graded in successive ranks, one above another. Most obviously, the clergy was so arranged in the seven steps of holy orders: doorkeeper, reader, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, priest. But simple stratification by orders was only part of a much more complex hierarchical system, in which the major differentiating factor was office. Both elements–orders and office–were the subjects of a considerable literature in the early Middle Ages: side by side with treatises on orders–belonging to the genre de officiis septem graduum–is a body of writings concerned to define the functions, relations and grades of ecclesiastical offices–the genre de ecclesiasticis officiis. Two related documents telling us of the customs at Old Sarum owe much to tracts of this kind: the Institutio, compiled by stages in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the Consuetudinarium of Richard Poore, written c. 1215, which greatly expands the Institutio.

Few incidents in thirteenth-century history have been more often described than the story of the Christmas crib at Greccio. Not long before his death St Francis arranged with a noble layman called John of Greccio to prepare a crib for midnight mass at Christmas, with plenty of hay and real animals, ox and ass, in attendance. Crowds flocked to the place and ‘the whole night resounded with jubilation’. Mass was celebrated over the crib. But not by Francis, for he was not a priest but a deacon; and he put on the deacon’s vestments, sang the gospel and preached. Strange as it may seem, it is only from this story in the First Life by Thomas of Celano, confirmed by some shreds of other evidence, that we know that Francis was in deacon’s orders. No explanation is given, no contemporary commentary expounds the fact. Yet it is abundantly clear that his deacon’s orders had some profound significance related to his conception of his Order and its members, and their relations one to another. It is a curious puzzle to discover what it was.

The purpose of this paper is to take a preliminary look at a phenomenon which began to occur over much of northern Europe in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries: the emergence of vicars choral and chaplains in cathedrals and collegiate churches. Studying the two groups together makes sense since they both acted as replacements for the senior clerics, that is the canons, in the churches where they served. In theory, the vicars chiefly served in choir and the chaplains at altars which had often hitherto been served (we may presume) by canons. In fact it is very difficult to separate vicars from chaplains since the terms were often used interchangeably at the time, and, furthermore, charters establishing these positions often specify that vicars choral would additionally serve altars and that chaplains would also attend the hours. For example, when Bishop Hugh of Wells of Lincoln ordained a chantry at the altar of St Hugh to be served by a priest chaplain and a deacon and subdeacon he laid down that the deacon and subdeacon should be chosen from among the vicars of the choir and subsequent arrangements for this chantry show that the deacons and subdeacons in the choir served for a week at a time. The emergence of vicars choral and chaplains is not of major significance in itself, since these men very rarely rose to positions of any importance, but an explanation of why they were felt ro be necessary is essential to a study of clerical ministry in the middle ages.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century ecclesiastical recruitment AA was flourishing in England. Hundreds of men turned up to be ordained at the four Ember seasons each year at which major ordinations were permitted to be held. The majority of these men were secular clergy; only a small proportion were members of religious orders. Of the scores of people in the diocese of Winchester who came at the stipulated time to be ordained to the major orders at this date only about one fifth were members of religious orders and of those, only a handful were mendicants. However, by the end of the century, after the ravages of the Black Death, although the total numbers of men being ordained had declined dramatically a greater percentage of these were regular rather than secular clergy. A similar pattern can be seen all over Southern England. It was a trend which persisted throughout much of the fifteenth century. This paper will investigate the changing patterns of secular and regular ordinations to the priesthood in southern England in the period between 1300 and 1500. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries extensive anti-mendicant feeling was expressed both in late medieval literature and in rivalry between the secular clergy and the friars over the pastoral role of the latter. Was this, in fact, a reflection of a reality which meant that, compared to the position in the early fourteenth century, far more ordained friars were on the streets and in the parishes?

‘He looked up at the pleasant plate-glass in the windows of the house of his friend the dean, and told himself how, in their college days, he and the dean had been quite equal—quite equal, except that by the voices of all qualified judges in the university he, Mr. Crawley, had been acknowledged to be the riper scholar. And now the Mr. Arabin of those days was the Dean of Barchester … while he, Crawley, was the perpetual curate of Hogglestock.’ The Last Chronicle of Barset is the story of a model clergyman, ‘a hard-working conscientious pastor’ and ‘still a scholar’ long after he had left university, who had never gained lucrative preferment. Yet this novel, as all those in the Barchester sequence, abounds with clerics of modest intellect and minimal spirituality whose benefices afforded extremely comfortable livelihoods. In short, the novel reminds us forcibly that a career in the Church was, in the nineteenth century, a gamble; the greatest rewards did not always go to the most deserving, but to those with the right connections through which they obtained the most lucrative positions.

Little is known of John Mirk. When he wrote Instructions, he was, its colophon informs us, a canon regular of Lilleshall priory, Shropshire. Lilleshall was a house of Arroasian canons, a branch of the Augustinian order, so named because its first house was that of St Nicholas, Arras. Lilleshall was founded in 1144–8, and contained some ten canons in 1400.

The line between things spiritual and things temporal, between religious and secular, was never very precisely drawn in the Byzantine world. It was not unusual that a man of affairs should be an erudite theologian, that a priest should be a a married man with a family, that a holy man should remain unordained, or that a layman should be appointed as Patriarch of Constantinople. Thirteen of the 122 Byzantine patriarchs were elevated from the laity, four of them in the eighth and ninth centuries. Among them were the Patriarch Tarasios in 784 and his formidably learned nephew Photios in 858, Neither was a priest. Both were high-ranking civil servants and scholars. The popes disapproved of this practice and said so rather forcibly in the case of Photios; but the Byzantines saw nothing odd in it. They continued, from time to time, to appoint a layman rather than a priest to the highest office in their Church. The tenth canon of the Council of Sardica in 343 had recommended that laymen should not be made bishops until they had been ordained and moved up the various rungs of the hierarchical ladder to the top. This, according to the later Greek canonists, required a minimum of seven days on each rung. In later times, Gregory of Cyprus, an admirable lay scholar and theologian, was ordained and elevated to the patriarchal throne in 1283, though he claims in his autobiography that he was ‘pushed’ on to it against his will. John XIII Glykys, who was made patriarch in 1315, had been a distinguished civil servant with an academic turn of mind and a teacher of philology. The facts of his preferment are outlined by his learned friend Nikephoros Gregoras. Not only was John amarried man with sons and daughters; he also suffered from an ailment which, his doctors declared, required him to eat meat. He was therefore excused the customary tonsure as a monk before his ordination. A carnivorous monk would not do; a carnivorous patriarch was all right. John’s wife, in accordance with the canons, obligingly left him and entered a convent.

After the great Reformation principles of ‘faith alone’ and ‘Scripture alone’, probably the most revolutionary doctrine commonly associated with Martin Luther is that of the priesthood of all believers. It is well known that, as it appears in his address ‘to the Christian nobility of the German nation’ of 1520, he intended this doctrine to bring down the walls of the new Jericho by striking at the heart of the distinction between clergy and laity on which the medieval Church was based. What is less well known is the reaction to this doctrine of Luther’s contemporaries, and in particular his critics. I propose to look at how they regarded the reformer’s conception of the universal priesthood, and what they thought its implications were, in the hope of shedding more light on its contemporary significance.

Calvin’s view of the ministry is dependent on his view of the Church and his view of the Church is itself controlled by his Christological emphasis. This is not true of Scholastic Calvinism, which before the rise of liberal Protestantism dominated the Calvinist landscape, but is in fact a deviant son of Calvin. The shift was subtle and largely unconscious, so that those brought up in the atmosphere of Scholastic Calvinism felt some unease but could not clearly say why, like Thomas Boston the Scots Minister of Etherick who found he ‘had no liking for the conditionality of grace’ or Fraser of Brea who ‘perceived that our divinity was much altered from what it was in the primitive reformers times.’

The part of Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity most attractively relevant to the theme of this conference is Book V, the first spiritually constructive exposition of the religion of the Book of Common Prayer. Hooker’s edifying account of the public duties of religion in the first seventy-five chapters of Book V and of the ordained ministry in the concluding six chapters can readily be appreciated today on its merits, leaving aside the fact that the religion of the Prayer Book was legally prescribed for all English Christians when Hooker wrote. It is on this currently unattractive fact of legal prescription that I want to concentrate, however, for it sets the historical context for the public devotional theology of Book V. To understand Hooker’s justificatory account of this fact is to become clearer about an essential difference between what is going on today when people minister and are ministered to in accordance with Anglican religious forms and what Hooker, at least, held to be going on when these forms were used in the sixteenth century.

The categories of shepherd and hireling are conventional elements of what may be called biblical and ecclesiastical pastoral, the legacy of John’s Gospel chapter 10 and the basis of a perennial polemical dichotomy. Preaching at Manchester in 1582 on a text redolent of arable husbandry (Luke 10 v. 2—‘the harvest truly is great but the labourers are few’) the vicar of Warrington strayed out of the cornfield into this pastoral vein: ‘Wee must understand that our Savior speaketh not of false Hierlings but of true Pastoures, not of those which beare an ydle name and title of Pastoures.’ John 10 had inspired a literary motif running back to Chaucer and Langland which, in what Sir Philip Sidney called ‘the old rustic language’ of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579), revived in the May eclogue. ‘Piers’, a good (and, according to Spenser’s commentator ‘E.K.’, protestant) pastor rebukes ‘Palinode’ (a papist, or at least a traditional clerical type) for condoning the Maytime sports of the country people, and in the person of Palinode all hirelings:

Well is it seene, theyr sheepe bene not their owne,
That letten them runne at randon alone.
But they bene hyred for little pay
Of other, that caren as little as they,
What fallen the flocke, so they han the fleece,
And get all the gayne, paying but a peece.

The image of the minister of the word current amongst English evangelical protestants and puritans was both exalted and ambiguous. Ministers were ‘the lord’s ambassadors, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the dispensers of God’s mysteries, the builders of God’s church and the chariot and horsemen … of a Christian kingdom.’ However, the qualities and qualifications necessary successfully to fulfill that role were onerous in the extreme. To be a true minister it was necessary firstly and essentially to preach, which in turn entailed the mastering a large range of scholarly skills, involving knowledge of the original languages, of logic, rhetoric, church history, and theology. But it was necessary also for a true minister to be personally godly, first because he had to lead his flock toward a Christian life not merely through exhortation but also through example and, second, because his own spiritual condition, the integrity of his calling both as a Christian and as a minister, vitally effected the efficacy of his ministry. After all, the deeper his own understanding of the word—always as much a function of spiritual insight as formal learning—and the more completely his own character had been made over by the sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit, the more effectively he could communicate his saving message to his flock.

On 14 February 1608, William Crashaw, who three years earlier had been vicar of St John’s Church in Beverley, preached a sermon at St Paul’s Cross. He took as his text a verse from Jeremiah—‘We would have cured Babel but she would not be healed; let us forsake her, and go every one to his own country.’ Yet Crashaw was no schismatic. His own career, beginning with his fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, had always been within the mainstream of the Established Church. In his will he set out the positions he had held as ‘the unworthy and unprofitable servant of God’. He had been ‘Preacher of God’s word first at Bridlington then at Beverley in Yorkshire. Afterwards at the Temple since then pastor of the Church at Agnes Burton in the diocese of York, now Pastor of that too great parish of White Chapel in the suburbs of London.’ There was much else besides; he had been one of the official editors of William Perkins, a writer of numerous works, whose sermons and catechisms were much sought after, one of the founders and shareholders in the New Virginia Company, with good connections at Court. At Paul’s Cross Crashaw condemned Brownists ‘who forsake our Church, and cut off themselves and separate themselves to a faction, and fashion, or as they call it, into a covenant or communion of their own devising’, just as much as those who ‘be such as refuse public places in the Church, and commonwealth, and retire themselves into private and discontented courses and will not be employed for the public’. In common with mainstream puritans he deeply disapproved of schismatics and was not above attacking them with the same vehemence he normally reserved for papists. It is ‘unthankful’ he wrote, to desert our Church. ‘There is indeed a true ministry of the word amongst us… We have the word truly preached.’ When Crashaw referred to the forsaking of Babel he had something very different in mind, for the solution this early seventeenth-century cleric offered concerned the Church’s ministry.

Over the last half century, a number of sociologists on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to define the contemporary role of the ministry. Among the ideas which emerged from their work, three are relevant for our purpose here. The first was that a number of roles which well-intentioned if not always well-qualified clergy had tried to play in the past had been lost or were being lost to rival professions, few of whose members were in holy orders: doctors and psychiatrists, marriage guidance counsellors and social caseworkers, solicitors and schoolteachers. Sociologists detected a sense of what was called ‘role uncertainty’ among the English clergy, and a feeling that in future they should be trained in new skills such as counselling. Allied to this disquiet was another concern, that the administrative and organizational side of the minister’s work was threatening to swamp the more important traditional roles of priest, pastor, and preacher. A third suggestion was that in an increasingly secular society the status of the ministry was declining. For centuries, it was argued, the clergy had enjoyed a unique place in society because of their sacerdotal functions and special skills, but this was now changing: the value of the Christian ministry in the eyes of the laity was falling behind that of more ‘useful’ professions such as medicine and the law.

In 1572, when the provinces of Holland and Zeeland were almost completely overrun by the ‘Geuzen’, Pope Gregory XIII (1572-1585) succeeded to the Holy See. In 1578 this Pope forbade the Roman Catholics in the rebellious provinces to give any civil or military service to the rebels’ authority—on penalty of excommunication—and identified Catholicism with being faithful to the Spanish cause. When this Pope died in 1585, there was reasonable hope held in Rome that the recapture of the Northern Netherlands—and hence the restoration of Catholicism—would soon be realized, as Parma’s campaign was succeeding in the South of the Netherlands and one town after another fell into his hands.

During the pontificates of Sixtus V (1585-1590) and Clement VIII (1592–1605) it gradually became clear to the Holy See that in the Northern Netherlands an independent state under Calvinist authority might be in the making. In these provinces the episcopal sees, set up in 1559, were either vacant or deserted since the bishops lived in exile. In spite of requests by Philip II the Holy See postponed the appointment of new bishops. However, in 1592 Clement VIII appointed an administrator, a ‘vicar apostolic’, who, in the name of the Pope, was to administer all the provinces where Calvinism had gained the upper hand, notably the area north of the great rivers in the present-day Netherlands. This vicar apostolic Sasbout Vosmeer (1592–1614) was consecrated in 1602 and given the title of archbishop of Philippi inpartibus infidelium.