Note 470 — ACT V.
Reading edition
It seems to have been too common a practice for the patron of a living to pocket the best part of the incumbent’s income—to “geld” the vicarage. Cf. Jack Drum’s Entertainment:— “Sir, it were good you got a benefice, Some eunuch’d vicarage or some fellowship”
(Simpsons’s School of Shakspere, ii. 172); Hall’s Virgidem., iv. 2, 105-6:— “plod at a patron’s tail To get a gelded chapel’s cheaper sale.”