ed to
read the Bible by night, dreading in themselves any burst of emotion or
enthusiasm as a possible prelude to heresy, the clergy ceased to be the
moral leaders of the nation. They plunged as deeply as the men about them
into the darkest superstition, and above all into the belief in sorcery
and magic which formed so remarkable a feature of the time. It was for
conspiracy with a priest to waste the king's life by sorcery that Eleanor
Cobham did penance through the streets of London. The mist which wrapped
the battle-field of Barnet was attributed to the incantations of Friar
Bungay. The one pure figure which rises out of the greed, the selfishness,
the scepticism of the time, the figure of Joan of Arc, was looked on by
the doctors and priests who judged her as that of a sorceress.

The prevalence of such beliefs tells its own tale of the intellectual
state of the clergy. They were ceasing in fact to be an intellectual class
at all. The monasteries were no longer seats of learning. "I find in
them," says Poggio, an Italian scholar who visited England some twenty
years after Chaucer's death, "men given up to sensuality in abundance but
very few lovers of learning and those of a barbarous sort, skilled more in
quibbles and sophisms than in literature." The statement is no doubt
coloured by the contempt of the new scholars for the scholastic philosophy
which had taken the place of letters in England as elsewhere, but even
scholasticism was now at its lowest ebb. The erection of colleges, which
began in the thirteenth century but made little progress till the time we
have reached, failed to arrest the quick decline of the universities both
in the numbers and learning of their students. Those at Oxford amounted to
only a fifth of the scholars who had attended its lectures a century
before, and Oxford Latin became proverbial for a jargon in which the very
tradition of grammar had been lost. Literature, which had till now rested
mainly in the hands of the clergy, came almost to an end. Of all its
nobler forms history alone lingered on; but it lingered in compilations or
extracts from past writers, such as make up the so-called works of
Walsingham, in jejune monastic annals, or worthless popular compendiums.
The only real trace of mental activity was seen in the numerous treatises
which dealt with alchemy or magic, the elixir of life, or the
philosopher's stone; a fungous growth which even more clearly than the
absence of heal