mass priest

In his 1912 book Brasses, John Sebastian Marlowe Ward says: "Canopies over Mass priests are very rare and this is by far the finest."

The average minister will receive enough to satisfy a minimal standard and then rushed into parish work where he will be little more than a "Mass priest" - albeit an evangelical one.

He had been Bebbanburg's mass priest when I was a child and, after my father's death, he had fled Northumberland because he could not abide living among the pagan Danes.

Cardinal Vaughan's biographer comments that, "there would probably have been much more resentment had the Holy See declared in favour of Anglican orders and declared Anglican clergy 'massing priests'".

At the start of the reign of King Æthelstan in 924, Beornstan was a member of his household, one of his mass priests, who were probably responsible for looking after his relics.

He increased the circulation of farthings by reminting £80 into 76,000 coins, ordered bakers to make farthing measures of bread for sale, and ordered that traders, mass priests and others accept payments in the coin or give their services free.

Huntingdon, however, wrote that 'it could not but be ill-taken of all the godly learned both at home and in all the reformed churches abroad, that we should allow of the popish massing priests in our ministry, and disallow of the ministers made in a reformed church'.

At the same time, the restrictions on 'pluralism' introduced through legislation in 1529 prevented the accumulation of multiple benefices by individual clergy, and accordingly by 1559 some 10% of benefices were vacant and the former reserve army of mass priests had largely been absorbed into the ranks of beneficed clergy.