Nor were these conclusions erroneous, if we may judge by an incident of the period. An archdeacon of Angoulême had committed the unpardonable crime of seducing the abbess of a convent in the district under his charge. When the results of the amour could be no longer concealed, and the Count of Angoulême ventured to remonstrate with Gérard, the bishop of the diocese, that worthy prelate protected the offender by dismissing the charge with a filthy jest. Yet so far was Gérard from forfeiting the respect of his contemporaries by this laxity, that he was soon afterwards appointed papal legate.[655] Somewhat similar is the conclusion to be drawn from an occurrence about the same time in the diocese of Comminges, where a deacon was entangled in a guilty connection and was summoned with his paramour before the bishop, St. Bertrand. The reproof of the holy man reduced the deacon to contrition, but the woman was defiant. He escaped punishment, while she was seized by demons and expired on the spot.[656] Yet there are evidences that the efforts of Calixtus, and of the fathers whose assembled authority was concentrated at Rheims, did not by any means eradicate a custom which had now become traditional. Soon afterwards King Louis-le-Gros, in granting a charter to the church of St. Cornelius at Compiègne, felt it necessary to accompany the privileges bestowed with a restriction, worded as though it were a novelty, to the effect that those in holy orders connected with the foundation should have no wives—a condition which shows how little confidence existed in the mind of the sagacious prince as to the efficacy of the canons so portentiously promulgated by the rulers, and so energetically resisted by the ruled.[657] That he was justified in this lack of confidence is evident when we see, further on in the century, an epistle of Alexander III., undated, but probably written about 1170, complaining of the canons of St. Ursmar and Antoin who openly kept concubines in their houses, while some of them did not hesitate to marry;[658] while as late as 1212 a council of Paris was obliged to adopt canons forbidding clerks married in the lower orders to hold parishes while retaining their wives, and suspending from benefice and functions all those who marry while in holy orders.[659] XVII. NORMAN ENGLAND. We have already seen what was the condition of the Anglo-Saxon church when William the Manzer overran the island with his horde of adventurers. Making all due allowance for the fact that our authorities are mostly of the class whose inclination would lead them to misrepresent the conquered and to exaggerate the improvement attributable to the conquest, it cannot be doubted that the standard of morality was extremely low, and that the clergy were scarcely distinguishable from the laity in purity of life or devotion to their sacred calling.