Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/74



This ilke monke let forby him pace, And held after the newe world ... Therefore he was a pricasour aright; Greyhounds he had as swift as fowl in flight; Of priking and of hunting for the hare Was all his lust, for no cost wolde he spare."

It was a dissolute age; the country was demoralised by war, by the ostentation of the rich and the desgerate impoverishment of the masses, by the almost complete immunity of the clergy from civil constraint, and by the license in which many of them as a natural consequence indulged. Of course the manners and morals of the time are not to be measured by the standard which is set up in our own days. A clergyman of the nineteenth century does not frequent ale-houses, attend cock-fights and boxing-matches, or rule the roost at boisterous convivialities. He does not even hunt with a good conscience, and if he dices or plays cards he does not indulge the taste in a mixed company, or in places of public resort. All these things were done freely and openly by jovial monks and seculars in the fourteenth century. The parish parsons were generally too poor for showy vices, but the poorest men could be "common ale-goers," and throw the dice for the cost of a tankard. From lowest to highest—not without exceptions—there was an ascending scale of vicious ostentation. The court, the chase, the tournament, and the pilgrimage itself were frequently mere parades of wantonness, and they were constantly attended by the regular clergy—by abbots and abbesses, priors, monks, and nuns.