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430 MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
dained? What training, intellectual and spiritual, did they have?
These are questions which the modern reader inevitably asks,
but they touch one ofthe most obscure points of medieval life,
and a satisfactory answer has yet to be given. It has at one and
the same time to explain the numerous rectors who could not
repeat the Pater in Latin and the author ofPiers Plowman who,
though probably only a singing/clerk, had a knowledge of
spirituality and of moral problems that would have left many
a bishop as astonished as it leaves the reader of today. That the
system could produce parish clergy of the type of Chaucer's
parson, as well as ruffians, is perhaps not remarkable, for
men's capabilities offeeling and of action, enlarged by Chris'
tian faith, are not bound by the limitations of educational or
administrative systems.
We have seen that the bishops and abbots, who had taken a
principal part in the deliberations ofthe Witan, took an equally
important place in the Great Council ofthe Conq ueror, which
almost immediately became a feudal gathering of important
vassals under their king and lord. This Council remained a
function of government for two centuries, changing somewhat
in composition; attendance, at least for the abbots, became a
burden rather than a privilege, but the obligation of answering
the royal summons remained. In the political disturbances of
the mid/thirteenth
century, when the Council was changing
by slow degrees to Parliament, all parties threw their net wide
in order to obtain the
greatest possible measure of consent to
their proceedings, and many abbots and priors, not holding in
chiefand in many cases holding in free alms, were summoned,
and attended. Edward I used this broad/based Parliament
for taxation, and swept in a still larger number of ecclesiastics.
While the bishops, who necessarily took an important place in
public life, and now began to take on themselves a heavy burden
of administration, accepted attendance as part of their profes/
sjon, for most of the religious it was an unprofitable
waste of
time and money, and they gradually succeeded in ignoring or
escaping the call save a nucleus of about twenty,
almost all
abbots of pre'Conq uest houses ; and during the reign ofEdward