ABSTRACT
Before the fifteenth century the writing of most legal writs, documents and letters, for both lay and church employers, was undertaken by men in clerical orders who kept their monopoly as long as records were in Latin. Literacy was almost a monopoly of the church. It has been estimated that during the thirteenth century one in 12 adult males was in orders, a total of some 60,000 in a population of perhaps 3 million.1 When we consider that the expectation of life was such that nearly half of that population consisted of children, the percentage of men in orders was very high. At that time clerics were the administrators for both the government and the church, their own estates being about a quarter of the land in England. Few people were far from one of the 800 or so religious houses. The control of their courts, manors, churches, hospitals, schools, almshouses, towns and other properties required much correspondence and a considerable messenger service. Over 9,000 parishes covered every part of the country and to them we can add the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford which were also clerical institutions subject to the visitations of bishops.2 The church touched the lives of individuals far more closely than did the Crown. Everyone was in a parish; everyone paid tithes and other fees; all but the greatest nobles could be be summonsed to appear before a church court.
