clean birds.

The monks and friars opposed the new learning now extending from Italy
to France, to Germany, and to England. Colet came back from Italy, not
to teach Platonic mysticism, but to unlock the Scriptures in the
original,--the centre of a group of scholars at Oxford, of whom Erasmus
and Thomas More stood in the foremost rank. Before the close of the
fifteenth century, it is said that ten thousand editions of various
books had been printed in different parts of Europe. All the Latin
authors, and some of the Greek, were accessible to students. Tunstall
and Latimer were sent to Padua to complete their studies. Fox, bishop of
Winchester, established a Greek professorship at Oxford. It was an age
of enthusiasm for reviving literature,--which, however, received in
Germany, through the influence chiefly of Luther, a different direction
from what it received in Italy, and which extended from Germany to
England. But to this awakened spirit the monks presented obstacles and
discouragements. They had no sympathy with progress; they belonged to
the Dark Ages; they were hostile to the circulation of the Scriptures;
they were pedlers of indulgences and relics; impostors, frauds,
vagabonds, gluttons, worldly, sensual, and avaricious.

So notoriously corrupt had monasteries become that repeated attempts had
been made to reform them, but without success. As early as 1489,
Innocent VII. had issued a commission for a general investigation. The
monks were accused of dilapidating public property, of frequenting
infamous places, of stealing jewels from consecrated shrines. In 1511,
Archbishop Warham instituted another visitation. In 1523 Cardinal Wolsey
himself undertook the task of reform. At last the Parliament, in 1535,
appointed Cromwell vicar or visitor-general, issued a commission, and
intrusted it to lawyers, not priests, who found that the worst had not
been told. It was found that two thirds of the monks of England were
living in concubinage; that their lands were wasted and mortgaged, and
their houses falling into ruins. They found the Abbot of Fountains
surrounded with more women than Mohammed allowed his followers, and the
nuns of Litchfield scandalously immoral.

On this report, the Lords and Commons--deliberately, not rashly--decreed
the suppression of all monasteries the income of which was less than
two hundred pounds a year, and the sequestration of their lands to the
King. About two hundred of the lesser convents