At the period when monastic chroniclers did not scruple to record anecdotes on the Roman Court like those in Thomas of Burton’s, general devotion was not merely lessened, it was disorganized, unbalanced. The chroniclers show, indeed, that excesses of impiety coexisted with excesses of fervour; the false pardoner, retailer of the merits of the saints, fell in upon the highway with the bleeding flagellant.[553] The papacy might show commendable good sense by its condemnations of both;[554] its decrees did not suffice to restore the equilibrium of {393} men’s minds, and the bounds of reason were continually being passed; in ardent piety as in impious revolt men went to the verge of madness. The account of the repulsive sacrileges committed in York Cathedral by the partisans of the Bishop of Durham seems unbelievable, yet the facts cannot be doubted, being reported by the archbishop himself.[555] Faith weakened or went astray; men became at once sceptical and intolerant. It was not in them the modern, serenely cold and imperturbable scepticism, but a violent movement of the entire being, impelled to burn what it adores. The man acts by fits; he doubts his doubt, his burst of laughter dazes him; he has had his revel and his orgy, and when the white light of morning comes he will be the prey of despair, shed tears, be racked with anguish, proclaim his conversion and vow maybe to go on a pilgrimage. Walsingham sees one of the causes of the peasants’ revolt in the incredulity of the barons: “Some among them believe, it is said, that there is no God, they deny the sacrament of the altar and resurrection after death, and consider that as is the end of the beast of burden, so is the end of man himself.”[556]