Such abuses and many others, constantly pointed out by councils, popes, and bishops, moved the University of Oxford to recommend, in the year 1414, the entire suppression of pardoners, as being men of loose life and lying speeches, spending their profits “with the prodigal son,” remitting to sinners their sins as well as their penances, encouraging vice by the ease of their absolutions, and drawing the souls of uneducated people “to Tartarus.” But this request was not listened to, and pardoners continued to prosper for the moment.[444] At the same time that they sold indulgences, the pardoners showed relics. They had been on pilgrimage and had brought back pieces of bone and fragments of all kinds, of holy origin, they said. But although the credulous were not lacking among the multitude, the disabused among the better sort were numerous and they scoffed without mercy. The pardoners of Chaucer and Boccaccio, and in the sixteenth century of Heywood and Lyndsay,[445] exhibited the most unexpected trophies. The Chaucerian one, who possessed a piece of the sail of St. {328} Peter’s boat is surpassed by Frate Cipolla, who had brought back much better from Jerusalem. “I will, as an especial favour, show you,” said he, “a very holy and goodly relic, which I myself brought aforetime from the Holy Lands beyond seas, and that is one of the Angel Gabriel’s feathers, which remained in the Virgin Mary’s chamber, whenas he came to announce to her in Nazareth!”[446] The feather, which was from the tail of a parrot, through some joke played upon him was replaced in the holy man’s box by a few coals; when he perceived the metamorphosis he showed no embarrassment, but began the narrative of his long voyages, and explained how, instead of the feather, the coals on which St. Lawrence was grilled would be seen in his coffer. He had received them from “My Lord Blamemenot Anitpleaseyou,” the worthy patriarch of Jerusalem, who also showed him “a finger of the Holy Ghost as whole and sound as ever it was, . . . and one of the nails of the cherubim, . . . divers rays of the star that appeared to the three Wise Men in the East, and a vial of the sweat of St. Michael whenas he fought with the devil”; he possessed also “somewhat of the sound of the bells of Solomon’s Temple in a vial.”