who, through motives of piety, had discarded his wife. As he lay dying, she hastened to him to watch the bed which for forty years she had not been allowed to share, and, bending over what seemed the inanimate form of her husband, she tried to ascertain whether any breath still remained, when the dying saint, collecting his last energies, exclaimed, “Woman, begone; take away the straw; there is fire yet.”(728) The destruction of priestly marriage is chiefly due to Hildebrand, who pursued this object with the most untiring resolution. Finding that his appeals to the ecclesiastical authorities and to the civil rulers were insufficient, he boldly turned to the people, exhorted them, in defiance of all Church traditions, to withdraw their obedience from married priests, and kindled among them a fierce fanaticism of asceticism, which speedily produced a fierce persecution of the offending pastors. Their wives, in immense numbers, were driven forth with hatred and with scorn; and many crimes, and much intolerable suffering, followed the disruption. The priests sometimes strenuously resisted. At Cambrai, in A.D. 1077, they burnt alive as a heretic a zealot who was maintaining the doctrines of Hildebrand. In England, half a century later, they succeeded in surprising a Papal legate in the arms of a courtesan, a few hours after he had delivered a fierce denunciation of clerical unchastity.(729) But Papal resolution supported by popular fanaticism won the victory. Pope Urban II. gave licence to the nobles to reduce to slavery the wives whom priests had obstinately refused to abandon, and after a few more acts of severity priestly marriage became obsolete. The extent, however, of the disorders that still existed, is shown by the mournful confessions of ecclesiastical writers, by the uniform and indignant testimony of the poets and prose satirists who preceded the Reformation, by the atrocious immoralities disclosed in the monasteries at the time of their suppression, and by the significant prudence of many lay Catholics, who were accustomed to insist that their priest should take a concubine for the protection of the families of his parishioners.(730)