The men into whose hands the property and patronage of the Church had passed took no steps to look after the repair of the church buildings or to provide clergy to preach the new religion. In some cases their neglect was due to the fact that they themselves were Catholic in their sympathies, and in other cases because they did not want to incur any expenses. As a consequence, the churches were in ruins and roofless, and no religious service of any kind was provided. Few English ministers of good standing in their own country cared to come to Ireland except possibly in the hope of securing a bishopric in the Pale districts, and as a consequence, the men who came were "of some bad note," on account of which they were obliged to leave their own country. Hence, in order to provide ministers to spread the new gospel it was necessary to ordain those who were willing to receive orders as a means of making their living. It is no wonder, therefore, that Edmund Spenser described the Irish Protestant clergy of the period as "bad, licentious, and most disordered." "Whatever disorders," he writes, "you see in the Church of England, you may find in Ireland, and many more, namely, gross simony, greedy covetousness, incontinence, careless sloth, and generally all disordered life in the common clergyman. And, besides all these, they have their particular enormities; for all Irish ministers that now enjoy church livings are in a manner mere laymen, saving that they have taken holy orders, but otherwise they go and live like laymen, follow all kinds of husbandry, and other worldly affairs as other Irishmen do. They neither read the Scriptures, nor preach to the people, nor administer the communion." A good account of the motley crowd who had been enlisted to carry out the work of reform is given by Andrew Trollope, himself an English lawyer and a Protestant. Although he referred particularly to Munster his account may be taken as substantially correct for the rest of Ireland. "In truth," he wrote, "such they [the clergy] are as deserve not living or to live. For they will not be accounted ministers but priests. They will have no wives. If they would stay there it were well; but they will have harlots . . . And with long experience and some extraordinary trail of those fellows, I cannot find whether the most of them love lewd women, cards, dice, or drink best. And when they must of necessity go to church, they carry with them a book of Latin of the Common Prayer set forth and allowed by her Majesty. But they read little or nothing of it, or can well read it, but they tell the people a tale of Our Lady or St. Patrick, or some other saint, horrible to be spoken or heard, and intolerable to be suffered, and do all they may to allure the people from God and their prince, and their due obedience to them both, and persuade them to the devil and the Pope." The Lord Deputy sent a report to England in 1576 "on the lamentable state of the Church" in Ireland.