His testimony in his own favour is not conclusive. Possibly, as Sr. Puyol y Alonso suggests, Juan Ruiz may have offended some of the upper clergy by ridiculing them in much the same way as he satirises the Dean and Chapter in his _Cántica de los clérigos de Talavera_ where influential dignitaries are most disrespectfully mentioned by name, or perhaps made recognisable under transparent pseudonyms. The Archpriest is more likely to have been imprisoned for some such indiscretion than for loose living. Clerical morality was at a low point in Spain during the fourteenth century, and, though Juan Ruiz was a disreputable cleric, he was no worse than many of his brethren. But he was certainly no better than most of them. His first editor, Tomás Antonio Sánchez, acting against the remonstrances of Jove-Llanos and the Spanish Academy of History, contrived to lend Juan Ruiz a false air of respectability by omitting from the text some objectionable passages and by bowdlerising others. Sánchez did not foresee that his good intentions would be frustrated by José Amador de los Ríos, who thoughtfully collected the scandalous stanzas which had been omitted, and printed them by themselves in the _Ilustraciones_ to the fourth volume of his _Historia de la literatura española_. If Sánchez had made Juan Ruiz seem better than he was, Ríos made him seem worse. Yet Ríos had succeeded somehow in persuading himself that Juan Ruiz was an excellent man who voluntarily became ‘a holocaust of the moral idea which he championed.’ Few who read the Archpriest’s poem are likely to share this view. It would be an exaggeration to say that he was an unbeliever, for, though he indulges in irreverent parodies of the liturgy, his verses to the Blessed Virgin are unmistakably sincere; he was a criminous clerk like many of his contemporaries who had taken orders as the easiest means of gaining a livelihood; but, unlike these jovial goliards, the sensual Archpriest had the temperament of a poet as well as the tastes of a satyr. It is as a poet that he interests us, as the author of a work the merits of which can scarcely be overestimated as regards its ironical, picaresque presentation of scenes of clerical and lay life. The Archpriest was no literary fop, but he was dimly aware that he had left behind him a work that would keep his memory alive:— ffis vos pequeno libro de testo, mas la glosa, non creo que es chica antes es byen grand prosa, que sobre cada fabla se entyende otra cosa, syn la que se alega en la rason fermosa. De la santidat mucha es byen grand lycionario, mas de juego e de burla chico breujario, per ende fago punto e çierro mj almario, sea vos chica fabla solas e letuario.