Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/73

 movement. They painted what they saw, and their pictures were recognised as true. If the satires had been mere lampoons, the songs and sermons nothing more than scandalous exaggerations, England would not have witnessed a dissolution of monasteries early in the fifteenth century; for no measure of that kind would have been ventured upon in advance of popular opinion. One hundred and ten years before the beginning of the great dissolution in the reign of Henry VIII., it is recorded that more than a hundred religious houses were suppressed; so closely is the parallel drawn between the final reformation and its first rehearsal.

The fact is that the abbots and monks had been corrupted by their wealth, as the secular clergy had been corrupted by their participation in politics and their relaxation of religious observances. The higher regulars, who were still supposed to shape their lives by the regula monachorum, had the faults and weaknesses shared by all close corporations. Their policy was to add land to land and house to house, to maintain the dignity and revenues of their abbeys, and to live, each according to his rank, as pleasant and companionable men of the world. Chaucer's monk, whom the poet describes on his April jaunt to Canterbury, was fond of sport and display, of horses and hounds:

"An out-rider that loved venerye; A manly man, to be an abbot able, Ful many a dainty horse had he in stable. ... The rule of Saint Maure and of Saint Beneyt, Because that it was old and somdel strayt,