In January, 1535, two documents appeared--the first, a royal commission to Thomas Cromwell authorizing him as the King’s Vicar-general to undertake a general visitation of churches, monasteries, and clergy, and to depute others to act as his agents; the second consisting of a series of formal inquiries to be made concerning the state of the religious houses, and royal injunctions for their reform. The latter is written in a strange hand, copiously interlined and corrected by that of the King’s minister[387]. The decrees were quickly put in operation. By the month of August in the same year Cromwell’s two agents, Legh and Ap-Rice, were hard at work among the Wiltshire monasteries, and sent in their reports to their master full of ludicrously pathetic lamentations, when unable to trump up any plausible charges against the monks[388]. Doctor Richard Layton, who had come under Cromwell’s notice at the time of the trials of More and Fisher, sent him a request for employment on the same mission, and eventually got permission to go to Gloucestershire[389]. He had made a preliminary visitation at Bath and Farley, and while there had aroused the jealousy and hatred of Legh, who wrote to Cromwell complaining that he was not sufficiently severe, and urging the necessity of uniformity of action[390]. A great many grumbling letters of this kind were sent to Cromwell by his visitors. Layton and Ap-Rice were not slow to revenge themselves on Legh by reporting to the Vicar-general the pride, arrogance, ‘sumptuus vsage, and roughe fasshyon’ of their hated colleague[391].