eir wives be fond, after the decease of their husbands, and bestow
themselves not so advisedly as their calling requireth (which, God
knoweth, these curious surveyors make small account of truth, further than
thereby to gather matter of reprehension), I beseech you then to look into
all states of the laity, and tell me whether some duchesses, countesses,
barons' or knights' wives, do not fully so often offend in the like as
they? For Eve will be Eve, though Adam would say nay. Not a few also find
fault with our threadbare gowns, as if not our patrons but our wives were
causes of our woe. But if it were known to all that I know to have been
performed of late in Essex, where a minister taking a benefice (of less
than twenty pounds in the Queen's books, so far as I remember) was
enforced to pay to his patron twenty quarters of oats, ten quarters of
wheat, and sixteen yearly of barley (which he called _hawks' meat_), and
another let the like in farm to his patron for ten pounds by the year
which is well worth forty at the least, the cause of our threadbare gowns
would easily appear: for such patrons do scrape the wool from our cloaks.
Wherefore I may well say that such a threadbare minister is either an ill
man or hath an ill patron, or both; and when such cooks and cobbling
shifters[129] shall be removed and weeded out of the ministry, I doubt not
but our patrons will prove better men, and be reformed whether they will
or not, or else the single-minded bishops shall see the living bestowed
upon such as do deserve it. When the Pragmatic Sanction took place first
in France, it was supposed that these enormities should utterly have
ceased; but when the elections of bishops came once into the hands of the
canons and spiritual men, it grew to be far worse. For they also, within a
while waxing covetous, by their own experience learned aforehand, raised
the markets, and sought after new gains by the gifts of the greatest
livings in that country, wherein (as Machiavelli writeth) are eighteen
archbishoprics, one hundred forty and five bishoprics, 740 abbeys, eleven
universities, 1,000,700 steeples (if his report be sound). Some are of the
opinion that, if sufficient men in every town might be sent for from the
universities, this mischief would soon be remedied; but I am clean of
another mind. For, when I consider whereunto the gifts of fellowships in
some places are grown, the profit that ariseth at sundry elections of
scholars out of