Yea, they can best skill of wines
Better than of divinity;
Lawyers are they of experience,
And in cases against conscience
They are parfet by practice.
To forge excommunications,
For tythes and decimations
Is their continual exercise.
As for preaching they take no care,
They would rather see a course at a hare;
Rather than to make a sermon
To follow the chase of wild deer,
Passing the time with jolly cheer.
Among them all is common
To play at the cards and dice;
Some of them are nothing nice
Both at hazard and momchance;
They drink in golden bowls
The blood of poor simple souls
Perishing for lack of sustenance.
Their hungry cures they never teach,
Nor will suffer none other to preach," etc.

[98] LATIMER'S _Sermons_, pp. 70, 71.

[99] A peculiarly hateful form of clerical impost, the priests claiming the
last dress worn in life by persons brought to them for burial.

[100] Fitz James to Wolsey, FOXE, vol. iv. p. 196.

[101] _Supplication of the Beggars_; FOXE, vol. iv. p. 661. The glimpses
into the condition of the monasteries which had been obtained in the
imperfect visitation of Morton, bear out the pamphleteer too completely.
See chapter x. of this work, second edition.

[102] FOXE, vol. iv. p. 658.

[103] 13 Ric. II. stat. ii. c. 2; 2 Hen. IV. c. 3; 9 Hen. IV. c. 8. Lingard
is mistaken in saying that the Crown had power to dispense with these
statutes. A dispensing power was indeed granted by the 12th of the 7th of
Ric. II. But by the 2nd of the 13th of the same reign, the king is
expressly and by name placed under the same prohibitions as all other
persons.

[104] HALL, p. 784.

[105] 25 Hen. VIII. c. 22.

[106] 28 Hen. VIII. c. 24. Speech of Sir Ralph Sadler in parliament,
_Sadler Papers_, vol. iii. p. 323.

[107] Nor was the theory distinctly admitted, or the claim of the house of
York would have been unquestionable.

[108] 25 Hen. VIII. c. 22, Draft of the Dispensation to be granted to Henry
VIII. _Rolls House MS._ It has been asserted by a writer in the _Tablet_
that there is no instance in the whole of English history where the
ambiguity of the marriage law led to a dispute of title. This was not the
opinion of those who remembered the wars of the fifteenth century. "Recens
in quorundam vestrorum animis adhuc est illius cruenti temporis memoria,"
said Henry VIII. in a speech in council, "quod a Ricardo tertio cum avi
nostri materni Edwardi quar