sbands, 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 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 grammar
schools to the posers, schoolmasters, and