£40.[1] Nothing was done in answer to the petition until 1529, when a Committee was appointed to draft a Bill dealing with these mortuary fees.
Mortuary fees were one of the "enormities of the clergy" which were highly oppressive and irritating. The clergy exacted mortuary dues not only from the fathers of families, but from widows, children, and servants. Poor men were driven by the curates to sell their goods in time of sickness "if there were such goods as were like to be their mortuaries." If a man died in one parish and had a household in another, mortuary fees would be claimed by the clergy in both places, and no religious burial would take place until they were paid. Mortuaries were demanded in many places where they had been previously unknown, and were "taken in such a manner that it made the people to think that the curates loved their mortuaries better than their lives."
A.D. 1529.—The Bill went through the House of Commons; but met with great opposition in the House of Lords from the Bishops. "My lords," said the Bishop of Rochester, in the Upper House, "you see daily what Bills come hither from the common house and all is to the destruction of the Church." Serious differences arose between the Lords and Commons as to the passing of the Bill, and it was only after the interposition of the King that the Act (21 Henry 8, c. 6) was reluctantly passed by the peers. Under its provisions, no mortuary was to be taken of any person who should have less than ten marks in effects, nor except where the payment had been usual, nor in more places than one. No mortuary fees were to be taken for children and femes covert. By the sections relating to Wales, no mortuaries were to be there demanded except where they had been accustomed, and in those parts they were to be taken as specified in the Act, but it was provided that the Bishops of Bangor, Llandaff, St. Asaph, and St. Davids were to take such mortuary fees of the
- ↑ Letters and Papers, Henry 8, 2, 1315.
