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4^8
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
the economic condition of the clergy, and consequently the
it is not
quality of their spiritual services. On the other hand,
a question that admits of a single, clear/cut answer. It could
scarcely have arisen but for the fact that the Church, owing to
indiscriminate gifts, to the appreciation of property, to the rise
of population, and to the wider exploitation of the land, had
become very wealthy. The Church, indeed, from c. 1160 on/-
wards, was too wealthy, while the relation oftithe to the needs
of the rural clergy was quite arbitrary. The rich benefices,
which ex bypotbesi were the natural objects of impropriation,
had been the first, before impropriation, to fall into the hands
of pluralists, absentee rectors, and (later) of provisors. To sub'
stitute one abuse for another, however, is not necessarily an
advantage, and appropriation no doubt played its part in
widening still further the gap between the small class of bene/
ficed clerks and the vast clerical
proletariat.
The 'church* that has been the subject of the preceding
paragraphs is the church ofa recognized group ofpersons and
of a delimited district a 'parish church'. It has been already
remarked that the parish churches of medieval England were
almost all in existence before uoo; this was stated in negative
form towards the end of his life by the scholar of our genera/
tion most competent to give such a judgement: 1 'It would be
difficult', he wrote, *to point with any certainty to a decree
which created a new parish.' Granted that before 1250 a
bishop's act of this kind might well have disappeared, the
judgement is striking when we remember that between the
Conquest and the Black Death the population of England
more than doubled itself, and that the area under exploitation
increased to a
striking,
if incalculable, extent. Besides the in/
nate conservatism, however, which preserved so many pre/
Conquest boundaries through the centuries, the economic
difficulties in the way of creating a new parish would have
been great, and the collision with the vested rights of patron
and incumbent considerable. Overhead reforms of this kind
were not made easily, save by a ruthless act of power, till the
1 A. Hamilton Thompson.