Ecclesiastical preferment was often a reward for services in other branches of the service of the State. Sometimes great offices in the Church and the State were held simultaneously. Thus, Archbishop Rotherham was also Chancellor of England for a time. Both Richard Scrope and William Booth, archbishops of the century, had been lawyers. The appointment of George Neville, who had been nominated when only twenty-three to the see of Exeter, was a purely political one, the bestowing of a high and lucrative office on a member of a noble family that was enjoying the full sunshine of popularity and power. The King could also benefit from Church positions otherwise than by presenting them to partisans. During the two and a half years that the see of York was kept vacant between the time of the execution of Archbishop Scrope and the appointment of Henry Bowett (in 1407), the revenues went, in accordance with the established practice, to the royal purse. There were also "clerks," educated men, but not priests, who were in "minor orders." Many a man, asserting that he was a clerk, made application for trial by an ecclesiastical court, so as to get the benefit of the less stringent judgment of the Church courts, to which belonged the right of dealing with ecclesiastical offenders. One abuse within the Church was pluralism, that is, the holding of more than one office at the same time with the result that the holder was drawing revenue for work he could not himself do. William Sever, for instance, while Abbot of St. Mary's, York, became Bishop of Carlisle. These two high offices, one monastic and the other secular, he held simultaneously from 1495 to 1502. The religious orders were of two kinds, viz. monks (and nuns) who lived in seclusion in monasteries, abbeys, or convents, and friars, who lived under a rule but came out into the world to preach and work. Both kinds took the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience to the rule (_e.g._, Cistercian or Benedictine, Franciscan or Dominican). Some, but not all, monks and friars were priests. There were four well-known orders of mendicant friars, viz. Franciscan (Grey friars, friars minor), Dominican (Black friars, friars preachers), Carmelite (White friars), Augustinian (Austin canons). Monks and friars wore sandals, and long, loose gowns with hoods or cowls which they could pull over their heads to serve as hats. The alternative titles of some of the orders of friars came from the colour of their friars' gowns. The Carmelites used undyed cloth, which was white in comparison with the black of the Dominicans. The Benedictine monks of St. Mary's Abbey wore black garments. Their heads were shaved on the crown, the technical term for which was the tonsure. [Illustration: SEMI-CHOIR OF FRANCISCANS. _From a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript._]