the eccentric Reginald Pecock of Chichester, who, while setting himself to confute Lollard controversialists, lapsed into heresy by setting "reason" above "authority." He taught that the organization and many of the dogmas of the medieval church should be justified by an appeal to private judgment and the moral law, rather than to the scriptures, the councils, or the fathers. For taking up this dangerous line of defence, and admitting his doubts about several received articles of faith, he was attacked by the Yorkist archbishop Bourchier in 1457, compelled to do penance, and shut up in a monastery for the rest of his life. He seems to have had no school of followers, and his doctrines died with him. The monasteries. In nothing is the general stagnation of the church in the later 15th century shown better than by the gradual cessation of the monastic chronicles. The stream of narrative was still flowing strongly in 1400; by 1485 it has run dry, even St Albans, the mother of historians, produced no annalist after Whethamstede, whose story ceases early in the Wars of the Roses. The only monastic chronicler who went on writing for a few years after the extinction of the house of York was the "Croyland continuator." For the last two-thirds of the century the various "London chronicles," the work of laymen, are much more important than anything which was produced in the religious houses. The regular clergy indeed seem to have been sunk in intellectual torpor. Their numbers were falling off, their zeal was gone; there is little good to be said of them save that they were still in some cases endowing England with splendid architectural decorations. But even in the wealthier abbeys we find traces of thriftless administration, idleness, self-indulgence and occasionally grave moral scandals. The parochial clergy were probably in a healthier condition; but the old abuses of pluralism and non-residence were as rampant as ever, and though their work may have been in many cases honourably carried out, it is certain that energy and intelligence were at a low ebb. Moral decay of the nation. The "Paston Letters." Influence of the Italian Renaissance.