The head of every parish in pre-Reformation days was the priest. He might be a _rector_ or _vicar_, according to his position in regard to the benefice; but in either case he was the resident ecclesiastical head of the parochial district. The word “parson,” in the sense of a dignified personage--“the person of the place”--was, in certain foreign countries, applied in the eleventh century, in its Latin form of _persona_, to any one holding the parochial cure of souls. English legal writers, such as Coke and Blackstone, have stated the civil law signification of the word as that of any “person” by whom the property of God, the Patron Saint, the church or parish was held, and who could sue or be sued at law in respect to this property. In ecclesiastical language, at any rate in England, according to Lyndwood, the word “parson” was synonymous with “rector.” Besides the rector or parson and the vicar, several other classes of clergy were frequently to be met with in mediæval parishes. Such were curates, chantry priests, chaplains, stipendiary priests, and sometimes even deacons and subdeacons. About each of these and their duties and obligations it will be necessary to speak in turn, but before doing so something may usefully be said about the clergy generally, and about their education, obligations, and method of life. From the earliest times the clerical profession was open to all ranks and classes of the people. Possibly, and even probably, the English landlords of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries were only too glad to bestow livings, of which they had the right of presentation, upon younger sons or relations, who had been educated with this end in view. But in those same centuries there is ample evidence that the ranks of the clergy were recruited from the middle classes, and even from the sons of serfs, who had to obtain their overlord’s leave and pay a fine to him for putting their children to school, and thus taking them from the land to which they were by birth _adscripti_, or bound. Mr. Thorold Rogers has given instances of the exaction of these fines for sending sons to school. In one example 13_s._ 4_d._ was paid for leave to put an eldest son _ad scholas_ with a view of his taking orders; in another 5_s._ was paid, in 1335, for a similar permission for a younger son. In the diocesan registers, also, episcopal dispensations _de defectu natalium_ are frequent, and show that a not inconsiderable number of the English clergy sprang from the class of “natives” of the soil, or serfs, upon whom the lord of the manor had a claim. Examples also could be given of a bishop allowing his “native” (_nativus meus_) permission to take sacred orders and to hold ecclesiastical benefices--acts of kindness on the bishops’ part shown to some promising son of one of the serfs of the episcopal domains.