This claim, there can be no doubt, was fully accepted and carried out. If a rector was for some reason or other non-resident, by law his charity or “hospitality” had to be administered either by the curate who served the church, or by a resident proctor appointed for the purpose. In acknowledgment of this obligation, in the wills of the period we find the clergy directing money to be paid by their executors to the poor of the parishes which they had served. Thus William Sheffield, Dean of York, who died in 1496, after arranging that this distribution should be made in proportion to the time during which he had held each benefice, adds: “For the goods of the Church are the property of the poor and therefore the conscience is heavily burdened in the spending of the goods of the Church. For badly spending them Jesus have mercy.” In the record of the visitation of churches in the diocese of Exeter, in 1440, there are many references to the “hospitality” kept by the clergy. In one instance the rector is praised for having rebuilt his chancel and added two good rooms to the rectory, one for himself and one for the purposes of hospitality. In another there is a note “that, from time immemorial to the day of the present rector, great hospitality had been maintained, and the goods of the church had been made the property of the sick and the poor,” but that this had ceased. It seems to us, indeed, almost strange in these days to see what was the teaching of the mediæval Church about the claims of the poor, and to remember that this was not the doctrine of some rhetorical and irresponsible preacher, but of such a man of law and order as was the great Canonist Lyndwood. There can be no doubt that the proceeds of ecclesiastical benefices were recognised in the Constitutions of legates and archbishops as being in fact, as well as in theory, the _eleemosynæ_, the _spes pauperum_--the alms and the hope of the poor. Those ecclesiastics who consumed the revenues of their cures on other than necessary and fitting purposes were declared to be “defrauders of the rights of God’s poor,” and “thieves of Christian alms intended for them;” whilst the English canonists and legal professors, who glossed these provisions of the Church law, gravely discussed the ways in which the poor of a parish could vindicate their right--_right_, they call it--to a share in the ecclesiastical revenues of their Church.