Continent, certain abbeys could claim up to one third of the goods of the dead man. There was nothing like this in England. But the Vicar of Morstow claimed ‘the best day-garment of each parishioner that dieth in the Said parish’; and the Rector of Silverton ‘the second-best possession or best'. Sometimes Cleric al landowners got a double death-duty, as lord and as rector: thus the Abbot of Gloucester Abbey got his tenants’ 'best-beast as Lord, and another as rector’. Mortu aries were taken on a wife's death, as well as a husband's; and if a husband died away from home, his estate was sometimes charged in two parishes. Sometimes, in one paris h, both the rector and the vicar claimed. Mortuaries were so much hated, and led to so much troub le, that secular authorities tried to ban them. But by the latter part of the medieval period the Churc h, as an organization, had become totally insensitive to this type of appeal: and it was imbued with the philosophy of canon law which tended to insist that to abandon a customary right might actually be sinful. Pierr e Albert, Grand-Prior of Cluny, defending them at the Council of Basle, 1431-43, could not produce any intrin sic, scriptural or natural law justification, and fell back entirely on custom: 'And so this custom began as a lioncub, which cometh forth at first as an abortion, and is afterwards quickened by his mother's licking. . . this is quic kened by an unbroken course of time and by consent, whether tacit or by the mere rendering and payment of the thing.’ In fact, mortuaries were often refused; then the clergy might have taken them by force. This led to riots, as we know from reports to the authorities. Or a man might make transfers of property before death ; but these were often invalidated by law (the Church had charge of wills): In Zurich, a man had to be able to walk without staff. crutches or help seven feet from his house to make a valid transfer. The most usual meth od of enforcement, however, was simply to refuse burial until the goods were handed over. Pierre Albert admitted this could be called simony, but added: 'In these cases, let the corpse first be buried, and then let an actio n be brought against the heirs'. The big-wigs of the Church were anxious to defend the custom not least because it was an important part of the income of the’ underpaid working clergy, who had no access to the plural ities system. As one sixteenth-century lawyer put it: 'Curates loved mortuaries better than their lives'; and therefore in many places there arose great division and grudge between [clergy and laity].' The abuse continued, even increased, right up to the Reformation. In 1515 Parliament petitioned Henry VIII that priests daily refuse to fetch and receive the corpses of such deceased persons. . . but if some best jewel, garment, cloth or other best thing as aforesaid be given them". Following a major scandal, 21 Henry VIII c.6(1529) regulated mortuaries, anr1 abolished them altogether for people dying with less than ten marks in movable goods; but trouble did not end until it was scrapped completely 'There were few things within this realm that caused more variance’, wrote an Elizabethan, ‘among the people, than they did when [mortuaries] were suffered.’ Mortuaries led to rows with the clergy at every level of society.- On the whole, townsmen were more likely to give trouble than peasants. It was the refusal of a Londoner to hand over his child's burial-robe, as mortuary, which led to the notorious ‘murder in the Lollard's Tower’ in 1515, a real harbinger of the English Reformation. Yet townsmen in the later Middle Ages were not exactly anti-Church, as such. They supported an enormous number of clergy about twenty times as many, per head of population, as today. Most of these were paid by voluntary contributions or out of endowments. A survey of urban wills shows that wealthier townsmen, at least, left a huge percentage of their property for religious purposes or charities. And the sums they contributed to the building or rebuilding of their parish churches, in the fourteenth and fiftee nth centuries, were enormous. The great majority of extant English medieval churches, for instance, were rebuil t in the Perpendicular style, from about 1320 onwards - usually the naves, in contrast to the chancels, which were the responsibility of the rector. Nor did they spend their money simply on the stone fabric: paris hioners installed glorious tie-beams, arch-beams. waggon-beams, coffered ceilings, angel-and-ha mmer beams. chancel and parclose screens, carved oak pulpits, lecterns, font-covers and pews, and rered oses and effigies of alabaster; and they presented patterns, chalices, vestments, altar-cloths, bells, crucifixes , lamps 62