How slender was the immediate result of the efforts of Innocent and Eugenius, however, is manifested by the allusions of Geroch, Provost of Reichersperg, who, writing about the middle of the century, complains that any one who would shun intercourse with Nicolitan and simoniacal heretics must quit the world, for it was full of them, and he maintains the propriety of calling them heretics because they openly defended and justified their evil courses.[789] Indeed, so shamelessly were their transgressions displayed, that the faithful were sometimes scandalized by the sight of the priests’ wives assisting their husbands in the ministry of the altar;[790] while conventual discipline had sunk so low that nuns were in the habit of deferring their formal vows until the lassitude of old age should render the restraints thereby assumed easy to be endured,[791] and canons led a life which was only distinguishable from that of the laity by its shamelessness.[792] Nor was this confined to Germany. In France, Hugh, Archbishop of Rouen, complains that those who married in orders openly defended their evil practices and quoted Scripture to sustain themselves.[793] In England, as seen in a preceding section, the new theory of Innocent and Eugenius remained a dead letter. Indeed, as late as 1470 Sir John Fortescue incidentally alludes to a recent case in which a priest named John Fringe, who had lived in orders for three years, procured two false witnesses to swear that he had previously been betrothed to a certain maiden, and this preliminary promise of marriage was held by court to supersede his priestly ordination; he was ejected from the priesthood and compelled to marry the girl, with whom he lived fourteen years, until he was executed for treason by the Lancastrians during the wars of the Roses.[794] In Spain, as we have already seen, priestly marriage was forbidden by the secular law as late as the latter half of the thirteenth century, and priests in consequence were wont to protect their partners by entering into the most solemn compacts, the customary employment of which shows that they must have been habitually enforced by the municipal tribunals regardless of the censures of the church. * * * * *