Such people had few scruples and knew how to profit by those of others. They released their customers from all possible vows, and remitted any penance, for money; they were a living encouragement to sin, making it so easy to atone for. The more prohibitions, obstacles, or penances were imposed, the more their affairs prospered; they passed their lives undoing what the real clergy did, the richer for it, and the clergy the poorer. The Pope again tells us: “For a small compensation they remit vows of chastity, of abstinence, of pilgrimage beyond the sea to Sts. Peter and Paul of Rome, or to St. James of Compostela, and any other vows.” They allow heretics to re-enter the bosom of the Church, illegitimate children to receive the sacred orders, they remove excommunications and interdicts; in short, as their power comes from themselves alone, they see no reason to restrain it and they use it to the full and without stint. Lastly, they affirm that “it is in the name of the apostolic chamber that they take all this money, and yet they are never known {324} to give an account of it to any one: ‘Horret et merito indignatur animus talia reminisci.’”[441] They went yet further; they had formed regular associations for systematically speculating on public credulity; thus Boniface IX orders in 1390, that bishops should make an inquiry into everything that concerns these “religious or secular clerics, their people, their accomplices, and their associations”; that they should imprison them without other form of law, “de plano ac sine strepitu et figura judicii”; should make them render accounts, confiscate their receipts, and if their papers be not in order hold them under good keeping, and refer the matter to the sovereign pontiff.