The principal residence of a great noble needed a chapel of considerable size to accommodate the number of people, as numerous as the population of a country parish or a small town, who were gathered into the castle during the residence of its lord:--the lord's household of knights and squires, yeomen and pages; his lady's separate household of ladies, bower-women, and women in various kinds of service; the garrison of the castle, with its commanders of knightly degree, their squires, men-at-arms, yeomen, and grooms; the several staffs which looked after the various departments of the service, the chambers, kitchens, stables, kennels, and mews; besides a constant flow of visitors, with their complex trains of guards and attendants.
In England only the chief royal houses have maintained the mediæval dignity of their ecclesiastical domestic establishments. Windsor Castle, besides its oratory, has its noble chapel dedicated to St. George the Patron Saint of England,[452] and its establishment of dean and canons, singing men and boys, housed in a picturesque group of collegiate buildings arranged round several cloistered courts. The Tower of London, besides its chapel in the White Tower, has its church of St. Peter ad Vincula in the courtyard.
Many of the great nobles, who maintained a state little inferior to that of royalty, had their chapel establishment of proportionate dignity. In the opinion of that time, a man of great rank and estate owed it to the glory of God that the worship of his household should be offered with circumstances of solemn splendour; he owed it to the well-being of the numerous people who depended upon him; and to the still more numerous people of all estates, who looked to him for an example.
The Duke of Buckingham's house at Thornbury had a chaplain, eighteen clerks of the chapel, and nine boys.[453]
The household book of Henry Algernon, the fifth Earl of Northumberland, who was born in 1477, and died in 1527, gives us very full details of the organization of the chapel staff of a great nobleman, their duties, and their emoluments in money and kind. They consisted of a dean, who was to be a D.D., or LL.D., or B.D., and ten other priests, eleven gentlemen, and six children who composed the choir.[454] The secular duties which were assigned to some of them will perhaps be better understood by a reference to the past. The clergy had always been the advisers of the English kings and nobles in the ordinary affairs of life: the Archbishop of Canterbury was the king's official chief counsellor till long after the Norman Conquest. Every ealdorman and great thane probably had a learned clerk in his house, not only as a chaplain, but as an adviser in general affairs. Henry II. organized his domestic religious establishment into a Department of State, and used Churchmen in the civil administration as ministers, ambassadors, and judges--there were none others so capable. The nobles were following on the same lines, when they made one chaplain steward, another secretary, and another tutor, in addition to their not burdensome duties in the maintenance of Divine worship. So the people resorted to their parish priest to advise them in their domestic difficulties and extraordinary matters of business, to arbitrate in their differences, and make their wills, for the simple natural reason of his wider knowledge of affairs, his greater experience of mankind, his disinterestedness, and, not least, his sacred character.