The middle classes supplied a great number of the clergy who filled the offices of parish chaplain (= assistant-curates), chantry priest, guild priest, and the like; and many of these, by force of learning, character, and good service, rose to higher offices. Even young men of the servile class were not excluded from the ranks of the clergy. The slaves whom Gregory and Aidan, and others, redeemed and trained as priests, may have been young men of good family taken captive in war; but in the thirteenth and subsequent centuries young men born and bred serfs were not infrequently educated and ordained, and given fair chance of promotion. It is true they were under special legal disabilities. A serf could not be himself ordained, or send his children to school without his lord's leave, for they were _adscripti glæbe_, bound to the soil, and their labour and their children's labour (or a portion of it, carefully defined by law and custom) was an important part of the property of their lord; the canons of the Church, moreover, from a very early period, had made servile birth a disqualification for Holy Orders;[124] but in the thirteenth, and especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there are numerous examples in which a serf gave a fine to his lord for leave to send his son to school, and kindly lords not infrequently gave the right gratis to a promising youth, and his ultimate freedom; and the Church frequently, probably usually, as a matter of course, gave a dispensation _de defectu natalium_.
From the single manor of Woolrichston, in Warwickshire, we get these illustrations of the text:--In 1361, Walter Martin paid 5_s._ for the privilege of putting his son _ad scholas_. In 1371, William Potter fined in 13_s._ 4_d._, that his eldest son may go _ad scholas_ and take Orders. Stephen Sprot fined in 3_s._ 4_d._, that he might send his son Richard _ad scholas_. William Henekyn fined in 5_s._, to marry his daughter Alice. In 1335, William at Water paid for licence for his younger son William _ad sacrum ordinem promovendum_.[125]
Here is another example. In 1312, the Bishop of Durham gave license to his _nativus_, Walter de Hoghington, clerk, to receive all Divine orders, and renounced his _jus domini_.[126]