eir estates; that having a life-interest only, they
had encumbered them with debts, mortgages, and fines; that in some cases
they had wholly alienated lands, of which they had less right to
dispose than a modern rector of his glebe.[486] In the meantime, it was
said that the poor were not fed, that hospitality was neglected, that
the buildings and houses were falling to waste, that fraud and Simony
prevailed among them from the highest to the lowest, that the abbots
sold the presentations to the benefices which were in their gift, or
dishonestly retained the cures of souls in their own hands, careless
whether the duties of the parishes could or could not be discharged; and
that, finally, the vast majority of the monks themselves were ignorant,
self-indulgent, profligate, worthless, dissolute.

[Sidenote: A hundred houses suppressed by Henry V.]

[Sidenote: Visitation of 1489.]

These, in addition to the heavier accusations, were the charges which
the popular voice had for more than a century brought against the
monasteries, which had led Wycliffe to denounce their existence as
intolerable, the House of Commons to petition Henry IV. for the
secularization of their property, and Henry V. to appease the outcry, by
the suppression of more than a hundred, as an ineffectual warning to the
rest.[487] At length, in the year 1489, at the instigation of Cardinal
Morton, then Archbishop of Canterbury, a commission was issued by
Innocent VIII. for a general investigation throughout England into the
behaviour of the regular clergy. The pope said that he had heard, from
persons worthy of credit, that abbots and monks in many places were
systematically faithless to their vows; he conferred on the archbishop a
special power of visitation, and directed him to admonish, to correct,
to punish, as might seem to him to be desirable.[488] On the receipt of
these instructions, Morton addressed the following letter to the
superior of an abbey within a few miles of London,--a peer of the realm,
living in the full glare of notoriety,--a person whose offences, such as
they were, had been committed openly, palpably, and conspicuously in the
face of the world:--

[Sidenote: Archbishop Morton visits the Abbey of St. Alban's.]

"John, by Divine permission, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all
England, Legate of the Apostolic See, to William, Abbot of the Monastery
of St. Alban's, greeting.

"We have received certain letters under lead, the