When prelates so sincere and so earnest as Ratherius and Atto were able to accomplish so little, it is easy to understand what must have been the condition of the dioceses intrusted to the great mass of bishops, who were rather feudal nobles than Christian prelates. St. Wolfgang of Ratisbon might issue thousands of exhortations to his clergy, inculcating chastity as the one indispensable virtue, and might laboriously reform his monasteries in which monks and nuns led a life almost openly secular;[346] but he was well-nigh powerless for good compared with the potentiality of evil conveyed by the example of such a bishop as Segenfrid of Le Mans, who, during an episcopate which lasted for thirty-three years, took to himself a wife named Hildeberga, and who stripped the church for the benefit of his son Alberic, the sole survivor of a numerous progeny by her whom he caused to be reverenced as his _Episcopissa_;[347] or of Archembald, Archbishop of Sens, who, taking a fancy to the Abbey of St. Peter, drove out the monks and established a harem of concubines in the refectory, and installed his hounds and hawks in the cloister.[348] Guarino of Modena might hope to stem the tide of license by refusing preferment to all who would not agree to hold their benefices on a sort of feudal tenure of chastity;[349] but he had much less influence on his age than such a man as Alberic of Marsico, whose story is related as a warning by Peter Damiani. He was married (for, in the language of Damiani, “obscæna meretricula” may safely be translated a wife), and had a son to whom he transferred his bishopric, as though it had been an hereditary fief. Growing tired of private life, however, he aspired to the abbacy of Monte Casino. That humble foundation of St. Benedict had become a formidable military power, of which its neighbors the Capuans stood in constant dread. Alberic leagued with them, and a plot was laid by which the reigning abbot’s eyes were to be plucked out and Alberic placed in possession, for which service he agreed to pay a heavy sum, one-half in advance, and the rest when the abbot’s eyes should be delivered to him. The deed was accomplished, but while the envoys were bearing to Alberic the bloody tokens of success, they were met by tidings of his death, and on comparing notes they found that he had expired at the very moment of the perpetration of the atrocious crime.[350]