The Bishop concluded:
The Sacrament of the Eucharist, when no priest is available, may be administered by a deacon. If, however, there is no priest to administer the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, then, as in other matters, faith must suffice.
Even with this exception, it is clear that the Bishop was authorizing a very considerable relaxation of the normal rules.
The authority to hear confession has, in all periods of the Church’s history, been restricted to the priesthood. To throw it open to laymen and even to women, though not in defiance of canonical authority, was a step to be taken only in case of extreme emergency. It was a confession on the part of the Church that the crisis was out of control and the normal machinery no longer able to cope with it.
The most revealing phrase in the Bishop’s letter is the one in which he refers to the lack of priests willing to take on new parishes or to visit the sick ‘perhaps for fear of infection and contagion’. The implied rebuke would have come better if Ralph of Shrewsbury himself had ventured a little farther into the battle. From November 1348 until 13 May 1349 the period in which the Black Death was at its height in all parts of his diocese, the Bishop remained at his house at Wiveliscombe, a remote village in the corner of his territory.{239} It is true that it was his normal practice to winter at Wiveliscombe and also only justice to say that he seems in no way to have neglected his duty or shunned direct contact with visitors from plague-infested areas. Indeed, a stream of priests came to his retreat to receive their letters of institution. No doubt he had good reason to argue, like Pope Clement before him, that the best way he could serve his flock was by staying alive and not indulging in false or, at least, futile heroics. But, when all is said and done, one would still have slightly greater respect for the Bishop and sympathy for his railing at the reluctant clergy if he had paid a single visit to Bristol, Bath or any other important town in his diocese while it was suffering the agonies of the plague.
However reluctant some of the priests may have been to expose themselves, the clergy of Somerset, another county in the Bishop’s diocese, did in fact suffer greatly as a result of the Black Death.{240} Institutions to new benefices rose from a more or less normal figure of nine in November 1348 to thirty-two in December, forty-seven in January 1349, forty-three in February, thirty-six in March, forty in April and then fell away to twenty-one in May and a mere seven in June – the month in which the Bishop thought fit to set forth on his travels again. So extreme was the confusion that the Bishop felt it necessary to insert a saving clause in all his appointments protecting his position in case, in a moment of excusable aberration, he instituted a priest to a benefice which in fact was not vacant at all. It would be most unwise to generalize on the basis of a single county but it is fair to say that the evidence of Somerset shows no tendency on the part of the parish priests to shirk their terrifyingly perilous responsibilities.
Such data needs closer analysis before they can provide more than an indication of a general trend and often the material for such an analysis does not exist. Though Gasquet himself does not mention the fact it seems, for instance, that in the case of Somerset about a quarter of the new institutions were the result of the resignation of the previous incumbent rather than his death. But, in its turn, for this figure to mean much one would have to know what inspired the individual resignation. Was it reluctance to face the dangers which confronted a parish priest during a lethal epidemic, the economic impossibility of soldiering on in an anyway poor parish which had now lost the majority of its more prosperous parishioners or, perhaps most probable, the translation of the incumbent to another, more important parish which had lost its priest? Even among those who died the statistics are not wholly conclusive since one or two at least may have been the victims of old age, accident or other disease rather than the Black Death. Such facts will never be established: the historian is lucky even if he finds proof that the vacancy was caused by death, let alone information about its cause.
Professor Hamilton Thompson has pointed out other considerations which throw doubt on statistics of this kind. For one thing, the place of death is rarely specified. If a Yorkshire parish priest died of the Black Death while on duty in Canterbury or a priest from a rural Hampshire parish preferred to tend his flock from his comfortable house in Winchester, then it would be misleading to quote his death as evidence of the mortality in his proper county or his proper deanery. Another flaw is that a few institutions were not recorded in the Register, presumably because of the muddle and stress caused by the hurried appointment of a quite abnormal number of new priests at a time when the officials responsible were themselves leaving their posts vacant with alarming speed. For certain important areas, too, the records are not available. And finally, it has proved virtually impossible to establish a list of benefices which can categorically be stated to be complete.{241} Calculations made on such a basis still possess great value, but almost always they must be used with caution and a certain scepticism.
A fortiori this is true when figures for the mortality among the clergy are extended to cover laics as well. It would be extremely rash to accept unquestioned Cardinal Gasquet’s firm assertion: ‘It cannot but be believed that the people generally suffered as greatly as the clergy, and that, proportionally, as many of them fell victims to the scourge.’{242} It can be contested that the beneficed clergy, with their education, high standard of living and less cramped living conditions, were much better placed to survive than their unfortunate flocks. But, on the whole, the arguments which suggest a higher death rate among priests than laics are more convincing. For one thing there was the nature of their work which, if conscientiously carried out, brought them into constant contact with the infected. In particular in the areas where the pulmonary form of the disease was rife, this must have been close to a sentence of death on any priest resolved to do his duty. For another, as Professor Russell has pointed out, the fact that the average age of the clergy was higher than that of the population as a whole meant that, in any given year, a higher proportion of priests were likely to die.{243} And finally, though the smaller size of the priestly household reduced the chances of infection, it seems also to have been the case that, once such a household was infected, the chances of any survivals were proportionately less. One rat family to a houshold and three fleas to a rat seems to have been the norm; the greater the number of infected fleas in proportion to potential human victims, the smaller the chances of escape.