* * * * * Besides the rectors and vicars of parishes, there was another class of beneficed clergymen in the middle ages, who gradually became very numerous, viz., the chantry priests. By the end of the ante-Reformation period there was hardly a church in the kingdom which had not one or more chantries founded in it, and endowed for the perpetual maintenance of a chantry priest, to say mass daily for ever for the soul's health of the founder and his family. The churches of the large and wealthy towns had sometimes ten or twelve such chantries. The chantry chapel was sometimes built on to the parish church, and opening into it; sometimes it was only a corner of the church screened off from the rest of the area by openwork wooden screens. The chantry priest had sometimes a chantry-house to live in, and estates for his maintenance, sometimes he had only an annual income, charged on the estate of the founder. The chantries were suppressed, and their endowments confiscated, in the reign of Edward VI., but the chantry chapels still remain as part of our parish churches, and where the parclose screens have long since been removed, the traces of the chantry altar are still very frequently apparent to the eye of the ecclesiastical antiquary. Sometimes more than one priest was provided for by wealthy people. Richard III. commenced the foundation of a chantry of one hundred chaplains, to sing masses in the cathedral church of York; the chantry-house was begun, and six altars were erected in York Minster, when the king's death at Bosworth Field interrupted the completion of the magnificent design.[235] We have next to add to our enumeration of the various classes of the mediæval clergy another class of chaplains, whose duties were very nearly akin to those of the chantry priests. These were the guild priests. It was the custom throughout the middle ages for men and women to associate themselves in religious guilds, partly for mutual assistance in temporal matters, but chiefly for mutual prayers for their welfare while living, and for their soul's health when dead. These guilds usually maintained a chaplain, whose duty it was to celebrate mass daily for the brethren and sisters of the guild. These guild priests must have been numerous, _e.g._, we learn from Blomfield's "Norfolk," that there were at the Reformation ten guilds in Windham Church, Norfolk, seven at Hingham, seven at Swaffham, seventeen at Yarmouth, &c. Moreover, a guild, like a chantry, had sometimes more than one guild priest. Leland tells us the guild of St. John's, in St. Botolph's Church, Boston, had ten priests, "living in a fayre house at the west end of the parish church yard." In St. Mary's Church, Lichfield, was a guild which had five priests.[236]