ABSTRACT
While we have a certain amount o f information concerning the election, functions and emoluments of the senior echelons of the Russian Church in the two hundred and fifty years before the Mongol invasion, unfortunately we know very little about the workforce itself - the parish priests, the ‘white clergy’ o f the towns and villages. We have, alas, no idea as to how in the early days they were recruited, how they were trained, how, indeed, they learned the basic principles o f the Orthodox faith and how they were taught to run their parishes. We hear of no schools, no spiritual academies for the training o f the clergy, unless o f course Vladmir’s scheme to educate the children of the ‘best people’ in 988 (see above, p. 42) involved the foundation o f a seminary. We can only assume that just as in the eleventh century Metropolitan Georgy brought with him a specialist to initiate the monks o f the Kievan Monastry o f the Caves into the complexities of the Studite Rule (see below, p. 67), so the early metropolitans brought with them from Constantinople - or perhaps sent for from slavophone Bulgaria - instructors capable of drumming into the heads of the neophyte deacons and priests the basic essentials o f their profession. After a generation or two the supply met the demand, as priests trained members of their parishes or indeed their own sons to succeed them in the ministry.
