The faithful parish clerk stands by the priest.
This appears in the fifteenth-century MS. Egerton, 2019, f. 135.
In the MS. of Froissart's Chronicle there is an illustration of the
coronation procession of Charles V of France. The clerk goes before the
cross-bearer and the bishop bearing his holy-water vessel and his
sprinkler for the purpose of aspersing the spectators. We have already
given two illustrations taken from a fourteenth-century MS. in the
British Museum, which depict the clerk, as the _aquaebajalus_, entering
the lord's house and going first into the kitchen to sprinkle the cook
with holy water, and then into the hall to perform a like duty to the
lord and lady as they sit at dinner.
There is a fine picture in a French pontifical of the fifteenth century,
which is in the British Museum (Tiberius, B. VIII, f. 43), of the
anointing and coronation of a king of France. An ecclesiastical
procession is represented meeting the king and his courtiers at the door
of the cathedral of Rheims, and amongst the dignitaries we see the clerk
bearing the holy-water vessel, the cross-bearer, and the thurifer
swinging his censer. The clerk wears a surplice over a red tunic.
One other of these mediaeval representations of the clerk's duties may be
mentioned. It is a fifteenth-century French MS.
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