He dismissed his curates when they married, having decided views on the celibacy of the
unbeneficed clergy.
The brother who now arrived had likewise been bred to trade, in which he no sooner saw himself worth L6000 than he purchased a small estate with the greatest part of it, and retired into the country; where he married the daughter of an
unbeneficed clergyman; a young lady, who, though she had neither beauty nor fortune, had recommended herself to his choice entirely by her good humour, of which she possessed a very large share.
More plausibly, he may have been (like Thomas Hoccleve) an
unbeneficed member of the clergy working in the public service: a member of the "clerical proletariat." (18) Producing Latin translations of English sentences was a common classroom exercise, one any educated person would be acquainted with, since Latin was effectively the native language of literacy.
first treats the secular clergy--the clerical group most needing reform--and he finds that the 17th-century Church elevated the ordinary priest to a plane virtually equal to that of the monastically vowed, achieving this by rigorously enforcing celibacy and instituting minimum standards for ordination, thereby reducing the large number of clerics who remained in minor orders or went
unbeneficed. The Church also established new seminaries, but B.
Certainly the boursiers of the Maginn and O'Molony fondations could expect to be as welloff as many
unbeneficed pretres habitue.
Clerical venality is colourfully skewered by the explanation of Patrico/Pater Cove its 'the fifteenth rank of the canting tribe, strolling priests that marry people under a hedge without gospel or common prayer book; also any minister or parson.' There was also a Hedge Priest 'an illiterate
unbeneficed curate, a patricio.' The latter was also known as a Puzzle Text.
Another contributor to the early development of the Royal School was Jose Miguel Alea, who was an abate, "an
unbeneficed clergyman of minor orders."(p.
He reads into C V 3552 that Langland came to London 'as an
unbeneficed cleric when he completed his university education' (197), a more plausible speculation than many in this book.