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RELIGIOUS LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 429
nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the need was imperative for
more churches, as
cottages grew to hamlets, and hamlets to
villages five or ten miles from their parish church up a York/
shire dale or in the Surrey heathland, or sundered by a river
unfordable after heavy rain. It was met chiefly by two processes,
working towards the same result in different ways: the one
was the enlargement of the lord's chapel in an upland manor,
which never became a parish church but developed into a
quasi'parish church with a rector admitting dependence upon
the mother church; the other was the construction of a parish
chapel (the modern chapel/of/ease) with a resident curate ap/
pointed by the rector or vicar and directly dependent upon the
parish church. Such chapels might originally have had no
right of burial (for the burial fee was a noteworthy part of the
incumbent's income) and might acknowledge an obligation
to visit the
parish church on certain annual occasions when
oblations were customary. These chapels were as frequently
established in growing cities as in remote moorlands; it has
been noted that one of the claimants to be 'the most noble
parish church in England*, St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, was
in fact during the medieval centuries a 'chapel'
to Bedminster.
But if the number of benefices with a rector or canonically
established vicar was, ifnot small, at least finite, the number of
priests, even excluding the regulars, was legion. The rector or
vicar of a large parish had under him the vicars or 'rectors' of
chapelries, as well as at least one 'parish priest*, who took
something of the place of the modern curate, and probably a
deacon to boot. In addition there would be a hospital or two
and a chantry and possibly a nunnery, all of which would
need it
priests;
will be remembered how the early
editors of
Chaucer strove hard to eliminate the 'prestes
thre' that the
prioress took on pilgrimage with her. In a town or city of fair
size, with colleges, guilds, and almshouses added, the clerical
numbers would be multiplied out ofall proportion (to our eyes)
to the population. Some of these, from the vicar downwards,
would be substituting for absentees; few could expect to rise
far in the economic scale. How did these men come to be or'