There is little doubt that those who wished to criticize the Church found plentiful grounds on which to do so during the next few years. On the whole, in plague as in war, those who take most care of themselves live on while those who expose themselves perish. The best of the clergy died, the worst survived. Obviously this is an over-simplification; many good men were lucky as well as less noble who were unfortunate. But the abrupt disappearance of nearly half the clergy, including a disproportionately great number of the brave and diligent, inevitably put a heavy strain on the machinery of the Church and reduced its capacity to deal effectively with movements of protest or revolt.
It does not seem that the new recruits who took the place of the dead were spiritually or, still more, educationally of the calibre of their predecessors. During and immediately after the plague the usual rules governing the ordination of priests were virtually abandoned. Many men who found themselves widowed took holy orders when already middle aged. In the diocese of Bath and Wells a priest was admitted to holy orders even though his wife was still alive and had not entered a cloister on the somewhat shaky grounds that ‘she was an old woman and could remain in the world without giving rise to any suspicions’.{496} The Bishop of Norwich obtained a dispensation to allow sixty clerks aged twenty-one or less to hold rectories on the grounds, more or less categorically stated, that they would be better than nothing. In Winchester, in 1349 and 1350, twenty-seven new incumbents became sub-deacons, deacons and priests in successive ordinations and thus arrived virtually unfledged in their new offices.{497} The Archbishop of York was authorized to hold emergency ordinations in his diocese.{498}
There is, of course, no reason to assume that a priest will be any the worse for having been married and taken to his new vocation late in life. Knighton it is true, referred to such recruits disparagingly: ‘…a very great multitude of men whose wives had died of the pestilence flocked to Holy Orders of whom many were illiterate and no better than laics except in so far as they could read though not understand’;{499} but Knighton, as a Canon Regular, had anyway little use for the secular priesthood. Nor did the fact that some of the new priests were unusually young when ordained mean that they would lack a sense of vocation or fail to become as good as their predecessors when they had gained experience. But, in the unseemly rush to fill the gaps, many unsuitable candidates must have been appointed and many novices thrust unprepared into positions of responsibility. Certainly in the first few years after the plague, when society was slowly pulling itself together, the Church must have been singularly ill-equipped to give a lead.
The ill wind of the plague blew some good even to the clergy. Coulton has calculated that, before the Black Death, the majority of livings in lay presentation were given to men not yet in priests’ Orders, often not even in Holy Orders at all.{500} Analysing the figures for four dioceses over a long period before 1348 he found that 73.8 per cent of the parishes were served by ‘non-priests’ unable to celebrate Mass, marry their parishioners or administer last rites. Most of these amateur rectors appointed professional curates to do their work but, though the souls of the parishioners might not be imperilled, the situation whereby prosperous absentees appointed qualified priests for the smallest possible wage to do the work which they were incompetent or unwilling to do themselves was not a happy one for Church or laity. During the Black Death the situation altered. The great majority of institutions went to ordained priests. The change survived the plague and an analysis of the period after the Black Death showed that the percentage of active priests in charge of benefices had more than doubled to 78 percent.
