<<Continuing this theme: in 14th century Winslow (1327-77), fathers regularly paid the lord of the manor (Abbot of St Albans) for permission to send their sons to clerical school (the usual expression is ad scholas clericales, but in some cases it's just ad literaturam, and in one the son is specifically prohibited from joining the clergy). Some of these sons later returned to live in Winslow without taking holy orders, some turn up again as chaplains who were presumably serving elsewhere but had to come back to claim and sell an inheritance, and some just disappear from the Winslow records. I've assumed that the sons were sent off to St Albans for their education, as it's too early for any of the North Bucks schools, but I wonder if anyone has any other suggestions, and if there's any significance in the use of the plural scholas. The ones who came back to live in Winslow were presumably equipped to act as the sort of low-level pseudo-lawyers to whom Matt referred.>> This is very interesting, David - you're right, these are exactly the kind of people I think sometimes scraped an income by legal work. May I quote you in my article? There has been some recent work on this clerical underclass, by people like Robert Swanson at Birmingham (who has written about the peasant chaplains of Alrewas in Staffordshire Studies) and Margaret Harvey, who gave a talk about the poor unbeneficed clerks of 15C Durham at the Fifteenth Century Conference last year. Swanson shows how some minor clerics from peasant backgrounds who couldn't get a living retained the peasant holdings they inherited, and may even have farmed them personally. I think I have one such in Great Horwood, a William Gilmot als Taylor, who leads a fairly typical existence as a middling peasant between 1401 and 1422, but from 1422 until 1439 is permanently absent from the manor, and throughout that period is always referred to as a chaplain (he seems to have re-appeared in the village in 1440, but was still called chaplain, or once just clerk). He came from a family slightly better off than most of its neighbours, who presumably could afford him an education, but weren't influential enough to get him even a chaplaincy until he was well into middle age. The odd thing is that when he died in 1458 his holding was inherited by his daughter. Either he had had a wife, who must have died before he took up the chaplaincy, or I am conflating two different men of the same name! I have no idea where his chaplaincy was - if anyone comes across a reference to a chaplain of this name, from the 1420s and 1430s, I should like very much to know about it. Matt