How did they all get a livelihood? is a question not easy to answer;
but there were many ways of picking up a livelihood by these
gentlemen. To begin with, they could take an engagement as tutor in a
gentleman's family; or they could keep a small school; or earn a
trifle by drawing up conveyances, or by keeping the accounts of the
lord of the manor. In some cases they acted as private chaplains,
getting their victuals for their remuneration, and sometimes they
were merely loafing about, and living upon their friends, and taking
the place of the country parson if he were sick or past work. Then,
too, the smaller monasteries had one or more chaplains, and I suspect
that the canons at Castle Acre always would keep two or three
chaplains in their pay, and it is not unlikely that as long as
Archdeacon Middleton kept on his big house at Rougham he would have a
chaplain, who would be attached to the place, and bound to perform
the service in the great man's chapel.
But besides the clerics and the chaplains and the rector or vicar,
there was another class, the members of which just at this time were
playing a very important part indeed in the religious life of the
people, and not in the religious life alone; these were the Friars.
If the monks looked down upon the parsons, and stole their endowments
from them whenever they could, and if in return the parsons hated the
monks and regarded them with profound suspicion and jealousy, both
parsons and monks were united in their common dislike of the Friars.
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