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Medieval Society
Clergy and Society
Although legally and socially the clergy was a separate order, they naturally interacted with the rest of society. Indeed, except for the monks, that was their specific charge—to act as pastors, shepherds to Christians.
At the level of the ordinary individual, this meant above all else administering the sacraments. From the baptism ceremony to last rites, the sacraments (which settled upon seven in number only late in the Middle Ages) were the chief points of formal contact between the clergy and lay society. Most folks did not go to church every Sunday but attended only on certain feast days. A good many attended only once a year, at Easter. This meant that years could go by in which a local priest and his parishoner never spoke with one another. Still less would an ordinary person come into contact with a bishop or a monk.
On the other hand, there were other points of contact, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. As stated before, a priest was expected to perform various semi-sacred, almost magical acts such as blessing the crops or ordering the ringing of the church bell in times of disaster. While the Catholic Church did not sanction such things, the local community certainly did. Beyond this, priests lived in a village or neighborhood and came into daily contact with the local community. Probably the best known result of this contact was the widespread practice of taking in a "housekeeper" who was generally regarded and treated as the priest's wife.
Beyond the priests, the group that had the highest interaction with the lay community were the friars—the Franciscans and the Dominicans. At first, these two orders were widely admired for their piety and idealism, but after a hundred years or so, as the orders grew wealthy, they came under fierce criticism. There weren't actually any friars at the time of Robin Hood, but the cartoon-like caricature of Friar Tuck exemplifies many of the criticisms: that the friars were fat, lazy womanizers who were overly-fond of drink.