His successor, Mauger, son of Duke Richard II., and archbishop from 1037 to 1054, was worthy of his predecessors. Abandoned to worldly and carnal pleasures, his _legitimate_ son Michael was a distinguished knight, and half a century later stood high in the favor of Henry I. of England, in whose court he was personally known to the historian.[362] The times were changing, however, and Mauger felt the full effects of reformatory zeal, for he was deposed in 1054; the see was bestowed on St. Maurilio, a Norman, who as abbot of Santa Maria in Florence had been driven out and nearly poisoned to death by his monks on account of the severity of his rule, and the Norman clergy, as we shall see hereafter, experienced their share of suffering in the mutation of discipline. * * * * * Notwithstanding this all-pervading laxity, the canons of the church remained unaltered, and their full force was theoretically admitted. Hopeless efforts, moreover, were occasionally made to re-establish them, as in the council of Anse in 990, which reminded the clergy that intercourse with wives after ordination was punishable with forfeiture of benefice and deprivation of priestly functions;[363] and in that of Poitiers about the year 1000, which prohibited concubines under pain of degradation.[364] In a similar spirit, a Penitential of the period recapitulates the severe punishments of a former age, involving degradation and fearfully long terms of penance.[365] All this, however, was practically a dead letter. The person who best represents the active intelligence of the age was Gerbert of Aurillac, the most enlightened man of his time, who, after occupying the archiepiscopal seats of Rheims and Ravenna, finally became pope under the name of Silvester II. The lightness with which he treats the subject of celibacy is therefore fairly a measure of the views entertained by the ruling spirits of the church, beyond the narrow bounds of cloistered asceticism. Gerbert, describing in a sermon the requisites of the episcopal and sacerdotal offices, barely refers to the “unius uxoris vir,” which he seems to regard in an allegorical rather than in a literal sense; he scarcely alludes to chastity, while he dilates with much energy on simony, which he truly characterizes as the almost universal vice of his contemporaries.[366] So when, in 997, he convened the council of Ravenna to regulate the discipline of his church, he paid no attention whatever to incontinence, while strenuously endeavoring to root out simony.[367] At an earlier period, while Abbot of Bobbio, in an epistle to his patron, the Emperor Otho II., refuting various calumnies of his enemies, he alludes to a report of his having a wife and children in terms which show how little importance he attached to the accusation.[368]