He came back a cleric.
We in England now recognize only three orders of clergy--bishops,
priests, and deacons. But six hundred years ago it was very
different. In those days a man might be two or three degrees below a
deacon, and yet be counted a cleric and belonging to the clergy; and,
though Peter Romayn was not priest or deacon, he was a privileged
person in many ways, but a very unprivileged person in one way--he
might never marry.
It was a hard case for a young man who had taken to the clerical
profession without taking to the clerical life, and all the harder
because there were old men living whose fathers or grandfathers had
known the days when even a Bishop of Norwich was married, and who
could tell of many an old country clergyman who had had his wife and
children in the parsonage. But now--just six hundred years ago--if a
young fellow had once been admitted a member of the clerical body, he
was no longer under the protection of the laws of the realm, nor
bound by them, but he was under the dominion of another law, commonly
known as the Canon Law, which the Pope of Rome had succeeded in
imposing upon the clergy; and in accordance with that law, if he took
to himself a wife, he was, to all intents and purposes, a ruined man.
But when laws are pitted against human nature, they may be forced
upon people by the strong hand of power, but they are sure to be
evaded where they are not broken literally; and this law of
forbidding clergymen to marry _was_ evaded in many ways.
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