progress of English sentiment towards the desire for
liberation from Rome was to be interrupted by a long and seemingly
decisive reaction, yet in the fourteenth as in the sixteenth century
the most active cause of the alienation of the people from the Church
was the conduct of the representatives of the Church themselves. The
Reformation has most appropriately retained in history a name at first
unsuspiciously applied to the removal of abuses in the ecclesiastical
administration and in the life of the clergy. What aid could be
derived by those who really hungered for spiritual food, or what
strength could accrue to the thoughtless faith of the light-hearted
majority, from many of the most common varieties of the English
ecclesiastic of the later Middle Ages? Apart from the Italian and other
foreign holders of English benefices, who left their flocks to be
tended by deputy, and to be shorn by an army of the most offensive kind
of tax-gatherers, the native clergy included many species, but among
them few which, to the popular eye, seemed to embody a high ideal of
religious life. The times had by no means come to an end when many of
the higher clergy sought to vie with the lay lords in warlike prowess.
Perhaps the martial Bishop of Norwich, who, after persecuting the
heretics at home, had commanded in army of crusaders in Flanders,
levied on behalf of Pope Urban VI against the anti-Pope Clement VII and
his adherents, was in the poet Gower's mind when he complains that while

the law is ruled so,
That clerks unto the war intend,
I wot not how they should amend
The woeful world in other things,
And so make peace between the kings
After the law of charity,
Which is the duty properly
Belonging unto the priesthood.

A more general complaint, however, was that directing itself against
the extravagance and luxury of life in which the dignified clergy
indulged. The cost of these unspiritual pleasures the great prelates
had ample means for defraying in the revenues of their sees; while
lesser dignitaries had to be active in levying their dues or the fines
of their courts, lest everything should flow into the receptacles of
their superiors. So in Chaucer's "Friar's Tale" an unfriendly Regular
says of an archdeacon,--

For small tithes and for small offering
He made the people piteously to sing.
For ere the bishop caught them on his hook,
They were down in the archdeacons book.

As a matter of c