Keeping Body and Soul Together: how a priest might make a living in 16th century Shropshire

Centre for Midlands History and Cultures Seminar

Speaker: Sylvia Gil

Abstract:

In this paper I will be looking at the wide range of activities priests could be engaged in and receive payment for.
While we might accept some tasks as those that one might expect to fall within the remit of any priest in his working relationship with church and parish – acting as a scribe of wills, for instance – but others, we might think twice about – construction work or running a tailor’s shop, for example.

A key issue is, inevitably, the level of clerical wages and cost of living, and what ‘keeping body and soul together’ meant, particularly for the priests of my original study, those made redundant by the reforms under Edward VI, with the 1548 dissolution of their chantry and service posts.

In addition to discussing the variety of these extra employments and their monetary value, their relevance to clerical status, personal reputation and parish relationships, will also be considered.

As we will see, priests needed economic diversity to make a living, a diversity through which ‘keeping body and soul together’ served not only the priests but their parishioners both living and dead: a good priest, indeed, might have been seen as one who was able and expected to support both constituencies, pragmatically and spiritually.

• Everyone welcome!
• Zoom link available soon