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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hurin70" data-source="post: 7904120" data-attributes="member: 6875491">Yes, more like the local priest (or better yet, bishop) than a Templar or Hospitaller. What's the difference? Well, the local priest/bishop has 'care of souls' -- he does all the priestly things like baptize, marry, and bury people. A crusader is just a monk or even layperson who does other things with his day (like fighting for the Church), even if he has taken on some vows to live by a set of religious rules. In addition to taking care of souls, medieval bishops often also fought, as a feature of the feudal system. This was because they were not just spiritual leaders: they were often given lands and castles and real military/political authority, because they held fiefs. I have read that the model for the cleric was the real-life Bishop Odo of Bayeux. He was the brother of William the Conqueror, and Bishop of Bayeux in France. So when his brother William invaded England, Odo was summoned to the army, and led a contingent of troops from his fiefs onto the battlefield. That may seem odd, and that sort of thing did come under criticism increasingly from the 11th century on. In some interpretations, Odo tried to serve both masters (God and King) by not using an edged weapon (so he wouldn't actually shed blood). You can see him depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry wielding a club: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odo_of_Bayeux" target="_blank">Odo of Bayeux - Wikipedia</a> . That idea was present around the time the DnD Cleric first appeared. More recently, though, some historians have suggested that this is a mistake: that Odo was actually wielding a kind of rod that symbolized secular power, of the sort that rulers had been using since the time of the Roman Emperors and Pharaohs. TL<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />R: the Cleric is based on the medieval fighting bishop, which was really a thing, even if the whole 'don't use edged weapons' trope might be historically inaccurate.</blockquote>

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