In later years, as his pupil Mathesius relates in the “Historien” of his conversations with him, Luther was anxious to induce the Elector to erect a “Priests’ Tower” “in which such wild and untamed persons might be shut up as in a prison; for many of them would not allow themselves to be controlled by the Evangel; ... all who once had run to the monasteries for the sake of their belly and an easy life were now running out again for the sake of the freedom of the flesh.”[316] According to Lauterbach’s “Tagebuch,” however (1538), the Elector had before this decided to rebuild the University prison as a jail for such of the clergy of Luther’s camp who misbehaved themselves,[317] and the Notes of Mathesius recently edited by Kroker allow us to infer that the prison had already been built in 1540.[318] Thus the account given by Mathesius in the “Historien” and quoted by him in sermons at a later date must be amended and amplified accordingly. Even Luther’s own followers looked askance at many of the recruits from the clergy and the monasteries, who came to swell the ranks of the preachers and adherents of the new Evangel. We are in possession of statements on this subject made by Eberlin, Hessus and Cordus. “Scarcely has a monk or nun been three days out of the convent,” writes Eberlin of Günzburg, “than they make haste to marry some woman or knave from the streets, without any godly counsel or prayer; in the same way the parsons too take whom they please, and then, after a short honeymoon, follows a long year of trouble.”[319] Eobanus Hessus, the Humanist, writes in 1523 from Erfurt to J. Draco that the runaway monks neglected education and learning and preached their own stupidities as wisdom; the number of such priests and nuns was increasing endlessly. “I cannot sufficiently execrate these fugitives. No Phyllis is more wanton than our nuns.”[320] A third witness, also from Erfurt, Euritius Cordus, complains in similar fashion in a letter written in 1522 to Draco: No one here has been improved one little bit by the evangel; “on the contrary, avarice has increased and likewise the opportunities for the worst freedom of the flesh”; priests and monks were everywhere set upon marrying, which in itself is not to be disapproved of, and the young students were more lawless than soldiers in camp.[321] Protestant historians are fond of limiting the moral evils to the period which followed the Peasant Wars of 1525 as though they had been caused by the disorders of the time. The above accounts, given by followers of the new movement, extend, however, to earlier years, and to these many others previous to 1525 will be added in the course of our narrative.