During the next two hundred years matters did not mend. We read of many ordinances by the Popes designed for the protection of the cemeteries and for the celebration of mass in them. But by and by, when the Lombards attacked Rome in 756, the work of ruin made fresh and rapid strides, and, in fact, was soon completed. These men were Arians, and they broke in and carried off some bodies of the saints to take them home to their own churches in the North of Italy; so that, immediately afterwards, Pope Paul I., finding himself quite unable effectually to protect so many cemeteries situated all round the city and so far from its walls, determined to bring the bodies of the martyrs for safer custody into churches within the city. This work of translation, as it was called, though not continued by either of his immediate successors, was resumed by Pope Paschal I. in 817, and carried on by others, the latest instance on record belonging to the days of Leo IV. (A.D. 848). All these Popes assign as the cause for the translation the state of ruin to which the cemeteries were now reduced, and the horrible profanation to which they were continually exposed, parts of them being even used by farmers of the Campagna for the stabling of their sheep and oxen. From this time the real living history of the Catacombs was at an end. As in the beginning of the fifth century they had ceased to be used as places of burial, so in the first half of the ninth they ceased to be frequented for purposes of devotion. Henceforward there was nothing to keep them in the minds and hearts of men. They were neglected and then forgotten.