Occasionally, too, the bad example came from very high quarters; all had not the Bishop of Durham’s virtue. Walsingham relates with indignation the behaviour of a cardinal who made a stay in England when the marriage between Richard II and the emperor’s sister, Anne of Bohemia, was being negotiated. For money this prelate, just like the common pardoners, removed excommunications, dispensed people of pilgrimages to St. Peter, St. James, or Jerusalem, and had the sum that would have been spent on the journey duly computed and given {326} to him;[443] and it is much to be regretted from every point of view that the curious tariff of the expenses of a journey thus estimated has not come down to us. The list of the misdeeds of pardoners was in truth enormous, and it is found even larger on exploring the authentic ecclesiastical documents than in the work of Chaucer himself. Thus in a bull of Pope Urban V, dated 1369, mention is made of practices apparently untried by the otherwise experienced “gentil pardoner of Rouncival.” These doings were customary with those employed by the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem in England. Helped by the connivance of the “very priors” of the order, they pretended to be “privileged” and exempted from the formality of showing apostolic letters before they were allowed to proceed with their preachings and to offer to the people their “negotia quæstuaria.” The parish rectors and curates naturally enough objected to such pretensions, but their complaints were ill received, and the pardoners, to get rid of them, sued them before some distant authority for contempt of their cloth and privileges. While the suit was being determined they remained free to act as they liked. Sometimes they were so lucky as to secure sentence against the priest who had tried to do his duty, and even succeeded in having him excommunicated: which could of course but be a cause of great merriment among the unholy tribe. “Very often, also,” adds Pope Urban, “when they mean to hurt a rector or his curate, they go to his church on some feast-day, especially at such time as the people are accustomed to come and make their offerings. They {327} begin then to make their own collections or to read the name of their brotherhood or fraternity, and continue until such an hour as it is not possible to celebrate mass conveniently that day. Thus they manage perversely to deprive these rectors and vicars of the offerings which accrue to them at such masses.” They have, on the other hand, Divine service performed “in polluted or interdicted places, and there also bury the dead; they use, as helps to their trade, simple and almost illiterate subordinates, who spread errors and fables among people as ignorant as themselves.”