Another poor priest told his bishop, with many tears, that, if it were a question of choosing between his church and his concubine, he should have to abandon the church; the story runs that, finding his income gone, the lady also departed. There is an equally dark lament in Ordericus Vitalis, the Norman, who lived in Abélard’s day. The letters and sermons of Abélard—Abélard the monk, of St. Bernard, and of so many others, confirm the darkest features of the picture. Only a few years previously the king had lived with the wife of one of his nobles, in defiance of them all; and when a council, composed of one hundred and twenty prelates, including two cardinals and a number of bishops, met at Poitiers to censure him, the Duke of Aquitaine broke in with his soldiers, and scattered them with the flat of his sword. Indeed, an ancient writer, Hugo Flaviniacensis, declares there was a feeling that Pope Paschal did not, for financial reasons, approve the censure passed by his legates. Considering the enormous prevalence of simony, one could hardly expect to find the Church in a better condition. The writers of the time make it clear that there was an appalling traffic in bishoprics, abbeys, prebends, and all kinds of ecclesiastical goods and dignities. We have already seen one tragic illustration of the evil, and we shall meet many more. A few years previously the king had nominated one of his favourites, Étienne de Garlande, for the vacant bishopric of Beauvais; and this youth, ‘of no letters and of unchaste life,’ at once took even major orders, and talked of going to Rome ‘to buy the curia.’ But, as with regard to the previous point, it is useless to give instances. Corruption was very prevalent; and one cannot wonder at it in view of the reputation which the papacy itself had, in spite of its occasional quashing of a corrupt election. This point will be treated more fully in the sixth chapter. The question of the deep and widespread corruption of the regular clergy must also be deferred. In his fourth letter to Heloise, Abélard complains that ‘almost all the monasteries of our day’ are corrupt; Jacques de Vitry affirms that no nunneries, save those of the Cistercians, were fit abodes for an honest woman in his day.[15] It is not a little instructive to find Abbot Abélard, in his latest and most ascetic period, telling his son (a monk), in the course of a number of admirable moral maxims, that: ‘A humble harlot is better than she who is chaste and proud,’ and that ‘Far worse is the shrewd-tongued woman than a harlot.’ [15] The condition of monasteries will be found treated more fully on p. 125; that of nunneries on p. 209.