is contumacious, declares that he holds himself bound to answer to no superior, whether bishop or archbishop, but to the pope only; and adds, “poor and miserable is the abbot who does not utterly annihilate the jurisdiction of a bishop, when, for a single ounce of gold a year, he may buy full liberty for himself from Rome.” The archbishop, therefore, entreats the pope not to aid and abet this turbulent person; and, at the same time, bitterly laments the injury done, not to the bishops only, but to the whole church, by these papal exemptions--exemptions which had proved ruinous to the peace, discipline, and good order of the monasteries themselves which enjoyed them.[75] Here, therefore, was a rift in the church, which time only widened, and which unfitted it for sustaining a storm whenever it should come. But the mischief did not end here. Long before the monks had escaped from the eye of their bishop, they had relaxed from the Sabine simplicity of their primitive institutions; now that they were left at liberty to do what seemed good in their own sight, matters went worse. Giraldus Cambrensis, a writer of the twelfth century, tells us, that on his return from abroad (he had been prosecuting his theological studies at Paris) he dined with the monks of Canterbury. Having eaten of their bread, he lifts up his heel against them, and maliciously exposes their bill of fare. It is curious as a picture of the times:--sixteen lordly dishes and upwards, besides a course of herbs, which latter, however, were not in much request; fish of divers kinds--roast and boiled, stewed and fried; omelets, seasoned meats, and sundry provocatives of the palate, prepared by cunning cooks; wines in ample profusion; sicera, piment, claret, must, mede, and moretum (mulberry),--any thing and every thing but ale, the boast of England, and more especially of Kent. “What would Paul the Hermit have said to all this?” thinks the splenetic Giraldus to himself, “or St. Anthony? or St. Benedict, the founder of the order?”[76] Such evidence, however, is to be received with considerable suspicion. There was for ages before their suppression, a run at the monks. A strong party spirit discovers itself in almost all that relates to the church in these middle ages, much as we are told of the harmony that prevailed in it before the reformation. The writer just quoted was a Welsh archdeacon, very far from a good-natured Sir Hugh, who would “persuade a man not to make a star-chamber matter of it;” on the contrary, he finds nothing as it should be: he is one of those dissatisfied spirits that delight in the study of morbid anatomy; neither monks nor bishops please him; he vexes himself because he cannot make a hundred watches go by his own, never suspecting that, after all, his own may be wrong; and, in his memoir of the Rights and Conditions of the Church of South Wales, he sums up the merits of the Cambrian Clergy with a testy anathema,