ABSTRACT
One ought not to generalise about whole nations, but if one thing can be said of the English people early in the sixteenth century it is that they thought little of priests. They were not alone in this: popular opinion all over Western Europe, though it preserved some respect for the Church as an institution, often treated its members with ribaldry. The literature of the later middle ages is full of stories which rely for their point on the peccadilloes of the priesthood; the hero of one discreditable adventure after another turns out to be a monk or a clerk in secular orders. In away, this does no more than reflect the natural feelings of men \vho, being sinners themselves, love to see self-professed virtue stray from the path of righteousness: a priest's gluttony, greed, or lust was funnier and more deserving of notice than a layman's because it conflicted so much more with his professional claims and status, not because it was necessarily more common or notorious. But people cannot laugh at or abuse their spiritual pastors for generations without losing all respect for them. There was thus much of that feeling which is generally summarised in the word anticlericalism. The higher clergy were disliked because they were wealthy and ostentatious ; Wolsey provided a suitable epitome of this alleged trait. The lesser clergy-parish priests and unbeneficed men-eamed contempt and dislike by rapacity and pretensions with which their intellectual equipment, material means, and private morality too rarely kept pace. Monks and nuns, hidden away in convents which-like all unfamiliar territory-were peopled by ignorance and lascivious imagination with all the abominations possible, gathered about them a reputation which was to make the most extravagant accusations credible and their overthrow easy.
