s to be not only unlawful, but null and void in
themselves. Yet the custom lingered sporadically in Germany and England
until the last few years of the 13th century, though it seems to have
died out earlier in France and Italy. There was also a short-lived
attempt to declare that even a clerk in lower orders should lose his
clerical privileges on his marriage; but Boniface VIII. in 1300
definitely permitted such marriages under the already-quoted conditions
of the Apostolic Canons; in these cases, however, a bishop's licence was
required to enable the cleric to officiate in church, and the episcopal
registers show that the diocesans frequently insisted on the celibacy of
parish-clerks. As the middle ages drew to a close, earnest churchmen
were compelled to ask themselves whether it would not be better to let
the priests marry than to continue a system under which concubinage was
even licensed in some districts.[16] Serious proposals were made to
reintroduce clerical marriage at the great reforming councils of
Constance (1415) and Basel (1432); but the overwhelming majority of
orthodox churchmen were unwilling to abandon a rule for which the saints
had fought during so many centuries, and to which many of them probably
attributed an apostolic origin.[17] This conservative attitude was
inevitably strengthened by the attacks first of Lollard and then, of
Lutheran heretics; and Sir Thomas More was driven to declare, in answer
to Tyndale, that the marriage of priests, being essentially null and
void, "defileth the priest more than double or treble whoredom." It is
well known that this became one of the most violently disputed questions
at the Reformation, and that for eight years it was felony in England to
defend sacerdotal marriage as permissible by the law of God (Statute of
the Six Articles, 31 Hen. VIII. c. 14). The diversity of practice on
this point drew one of the sharpest lines between reformers and
orthodox, until the disorders introduced by these religious wars tempted
the latter to imitate in considerable numbers the licence of their
rivals.[18] This moved the emperor Charles V. to obtain from Paul III.
dispensations for married priests in his dominions; and his successor
Ferdinand, with the equally Catholic sovereigns of France, Bavaria and
Poland, pleaded strongly at the council of Trent (1545) for permissive
marriage. The council, after some hesitation, took the contrary course,
and in the 9th canon of its 24th