way) leaving them altogether unserved.[113] By-and-by the example of the monasteries was followed by the chantries, colleges, hospitals, and nunneries; these, in their turn, learned the art of procuring impropriations;[114] nay, even corporations, transforming themselves, by a legal fiction, into religious societies, did the same; for before King Henry VIII. there seems to have been no precedent in England for a mere layman to be an impropriator.[115] The monks, however, had peculiar facilities for the accumulation of livings. Their influence with some neighbouring lord of a manor would often win him to make over the church on his estate, and the tithes with which it might be endowed, to their own abbey; they, meanwhile, undertaking to provide for the fulfilment of the ecclesiastical duties belonging to it. Then, again, if they could not beg they could buy, often the parish itself, as well as the benefice; or where the purchase was more circumscribed, the pope, ever their friend, would sometimes grant them the privilege of non-payment of tithes to the extent of such estate, to the great injury of the clergymen, when it happened to be considerable. Thus rectories were reduced to vicarages; the greater tithes going to the abbey fund, the small tithes left as a miserable stipend (often not more than a sixteenth part of the revenue of the benefice[116]) to the minister, who took the monks’ labouring oar under the title of _vicarius_. Thus originated that divorce between the property of the parish church and the minister of it, which continues in most instances of vicarages to this day; and thus it came to pass that town livings (contrary to all reason) are at present of all others, the poorest, less than the usual pittance of endowment having been left to them by the considerate monks, who reckoned, and perhaps rightly reckoned, in the days when masses were said, that a large population would supply by fees alone an adequate provision for the vicar. Meanwhile, the people were disgusted with this gross and cruel invasion of the rights of their pastors; and the representatives of the monasteries read themselves in amidst reproaches loud and deep, of the bystanders.[117] But they were not thin-skinned. They prepared, however, a sop for Cerberus, by exacting with little rigour the small tithes, or, in some cases, by accepting an easy composition instead of them; hoping, by such _modus_ (_decimandi_) to purchase the more cheerful and prompt payment of the great tithes, which was their affair; and not at all uneasy because the propitiation happened to be made at the vicar’s expense.[118] Their only remaining concern was to find some “Sir Johns” (as the poor clergy were called before the Reformation,) sometimes with an honourable adjunct of “lack Latin,”[119] or “mumble-matins[120],” or “babbling Sir Johns,”[121] or “blind Sir Johns,”[122] as it might be, who were just qualified according to the