For the next three or four centuries there is little to note but the
continual evidence of open or secret resistance to these decrees, and
the parallel frequency and stringency of ecclesiastical legislation,
which by its very monotony bears witness to its own want of success. At
least seven episcopal constitutions of the 8th and 9th centuries forbade
the priest to have even his mother or his sister in the house.[6] Nor
did the only difficulty lie in such secret breaches of the law; in many
districts the priesthood tended to become a mere hereditary caste, to
the disadvantage of church and state alike. In northern and southern
Italy public clerical marriages were extremely frequent, whether with or
without regular forms.[7] The see of Rouen was held for more than a
century (942-1054) by three successive bishops who were family men and
two of whom were openly married.[8] In England St Swithun (d. 862) was
married, though very likely by special papal dispensation; and the
married clergy were apparently predominant in Alfred's time. In spite of
Dunstan's reforms at the end of the 10th century, the Norman Lanfranc
found so many wedded priests that he dared not decree their separation;
and when his successor St Anselm attempted to go further, this seemed a
perilous novelty even to so distinguished an ecclesiastic as Henry of
Huntingdon, who wrote: "About Michaelmas of this same year (1102)
Archbishop Anselm held a council in London, wherein he forbade wives to
the English priesthood, heretofore not forbidden; which seemed to some a
matter of great purity, but to others a perilous thing, lest the clergy,
in striving after a purity too great for human strength, should fall
into horrible impurity, to the extreme dishonour of the Christian name"
(lib. vii.; Migne, _P.L._ cxcv. col. 944). Yet this was at a time when
the decisive and continued action of two great popes ought to have left
no possible doubt as to the law of the church.

The growing tendency of the clergy to look upon their endowments as
hereditary fiefs, their consequent worldliness and (it must be added)
their vices, aroused the indignation of two very remarkable men in the
latter half of the 11th century. St Pietro Damiani (988-1072) was a
scholar, hermit and reformer, who did more perhaps than any one else to
combat the open marriages of the clergy. He complained that exhortation
was wasted even on the bishops, "because they despair of attaining to
the pinnacle of