is blessing by giving
"a' the fause carles to the de'il," to which the company, not
understanding his Scotch Latinity, said "Amen!"

When such was the condition of the bishops, it is not surprising to find
that few of the ordinary priests were acquainted with even the rudiments
of the Latin tongue, and they consequently mumbled over masses which
they did not understand. A rector of a parish, we are told, going to law
with his parishioners about paving the church, cited these words,
_Paveant illi, non paveam ego_, which, ascribing them to St. Peter, he
thus construed: "They are to pave the church, not I"--and this was
allowed to be good law by a judge who was himself an ecclesiastic.

We have an amusing example of the ignorance of the lower orders of
churchmen during the "dark ages" in No. xii of _A Hundred Mery Talys_,
as follows: "The archdekyn of Essex, that had ben longe in auctorite, in
a tyme of vysytacyon, whan all the prestys apperyd before hym, called
aside iii. of the yonge prestys which were acusyd that th[e]y could not
wel say theyr dyvyne service, and askyd of them, when they sayd mas,
whether they sayd corpus meus or corpum meum. The fyrst prest sayde that
he sayd corpus meus. The second sayd that he sayd corpum meum. And than
he asked of the thyrd how he sayde; whyche answered and sayd thus: Sir,
because it is so great a dout, and dyvers men be in dyvers opynyons,
therfore, because I wolde be sure I wolde not offende, whan I come to
the place I leve it clene out and say nothynge therfore. Wherfore the
bysshoppe than openly rebuked them all thre. But dyvers that were
present thought more defaut in hym, because he hym selfe beforetyme had
admytted them to be prestys." And assuredly they were right in so
thinking, and the worthy archdeacon (or bishop, as he is also styled),
who had probably passed the three young men "for value received" from
their fathers, should have refrained from publicly examining them
afterwards.

The covetousness and irreverence of the churchmen in former times are
well exemplified in another tale given in the same old jest-book, No.
lxxi, which, with spelling modernised, goes thus: "Sometime there
dwelled a priest in Stratford-on-Avon, of small learning, which
undevoutly sang mass and oftentimes twice on one day. So it happened on
a time, after his second mass was done in short space, not a mile from
Stratford there met him divers merchantmen, which would have heard mass,
and desir