Good ladyship dictated that Margaret should try to obtain benefices for her clerics whenever possible. But there was also a practical side to this: once the cleric held a benefice, he was assumed to have an adequate income, making it unnecessary to continue paying him wages as a household servant. A pair of examples demonstrates how this worked. Nicholas Caraunt, secretary of the queen's council, was in full orders and beneficed; therefore, he received no salary although he was remunerated for his writing materials. George Ashby, Margaret's clerk of the signet, who was only in minor orders and thus ineligible for a cure of souls position, received a wage.

The first letter, to Master Gilbert Kymer, provides a fairly generic example of Margaret's search for such positions. Her assurance of the high quality of her clerks is ramped up in the next two letters to a formulaic insistence that her candidates are worthy for their ‘vertues, merites, and clerkly governance, as for [their] famows and clene lyvyng’. Such endorsements were to be expected. In the later Middle Ages, when popular criticism of clerical competence and morality was high, they may also have been necessary. In this regard, Margaret's use of the words ‘fame’ and ‘famous’ deserves note. The medieval understanding of fame, or fama in the Latin from which it derived, involved public reputation; moreover, reputation that was talked about. When she used these words, Margaret implied that the value judgment was not merely her private assessment, but a matter of public knowledge and public expression. We have seen this phenomenon in the queen's letters promoting marriage, and we will see it again and again in other situations: reputation was a public matter, to be publicly known and proclaimed.

Although most of Margaret's clerical recommendations naturally involved men, her attentions were not limited to male clergy. Three letters in this chapter concern the election of prioresses. In the case of Wix Priory, Margaret was asked for license to elect as she held the advowson of the priory. This she was willing to grant, apparently without intruding her own wishes upon their selection.