Among the many curious anecdotes told in illustration of the gross
ignorance of the higher orders of the clergy in medieval times the two
following are not the least amusing:

About the year 1330 Louis Beaumont was bishop of Durham. He was an
extremely illiterate French nobleman, so incapable of reading that he
could not, although he had studied them, read the bulls announced to the
people at his consecration. During that ceremony the word
"metropoliticæ" occurred. The bishop paused, and tried in vain to repeat
it, and at last remarked: "Suppose that said." Then he came to
"enigmate," which also puzzled him. "By St. Louis!" he exclaimed in
indignation, "it could be no gentleman who wrote that stuff!"

Our second anecdote is probably more generally known: Andrew Forman, who
was bishop of Moray and papal legate for Scotland, at an entertainment
given by him at Rome to the Pope and cardinals, blundered so in his
Latinity when he said grace that his Holiness and the cardinals lost
their gravity. The disconcerted bishop concluded his blessing by giving
"a' the fause carles to the de'il," to which the company, not
understanding his Scotch Latinity, said "Amen!"

When such was the condition of the bishops, it is not surprising to find
that few of the ordinary priests were acquainted with even the rudiments
of the Latin tongue, and they consequently mumbled over masses which
they did not understand. A rector of a parish, we are told, going to law
with his parishioners about paving the church, cited these words,
_Paveant illi, non paveam ego_, which, ascribing them to St. Peter, he
thus construed: "They are to pave the church, not I"--and this was
allowed to be good law by a judge who was himself an ecclesiastic.