The clergy of the Established Church were little better. Like the landlords, they were generally absentees, and employed agents to raise their tithes, in the North from the Presbyterians, and in other parts of the island from the Catholics. “As the absentee landlord,” says Froude, “had his middleman, the absentee incumbent had his tithe farmer and tithe proctor—perhaps of all the carrion who were preying on the carcase of the Irish peasantry the vilest and most accursed. As the century waned and life grew more extravagant, the tithe proctor, like his neighbors, grew more grasping and avaricious. He exacted from the peasants the full pound of flesh. His trade was dangerous, and therefore he required to be highly paid. He handed to his employer perhaps half what he collected. He fleeced the flock and he fleeced their shepherd.” “The use of the tithe farmer,” said Grattan, “is to get from the parishioners what the clergyman would be ashamed to demand, and to enable the clergyman to absent himself from duty. His livelihood is extortion. He is a wolf left by the shepherd to take care of the flock in his absence.”[17] Footnote 17: _The English in Ireland_, vol. ii. p. 453. In the midst of the general excitement the Catholic peasants grew restless under this horrible system of organized plunder and extortion. They banded together and took an oath to pay only a specified sum to the clergyman or his agent. The movement spread, and occasional acts of violence were committed. All Munster was organized, and a regular war with the tithe proctors was begun. In the popular fury crimes were perpetrated and the innocent were often made to suffer with the guilty. Yet so glaring were the wrongs and so frightful the abuses from which the peasants were suffering that they everywhere met with sympathy. The true cause of these disorders was social and not political. Misery, and not partisan zeal, had driven the Catholics to take up arms. The cry of hungry women and children for bread resounded louder in their ears than the shouts of the patriots. They were without food or raiment, and in despair they sought to wreak vengeance upon the inhuman tyrants who had reduced them to starvation. Even Fitzgibbon, afterwards Lord Clare, was forced to admit that the Munster peasants were in a state of oppression, abject poverty, and misery not to be equalled in the world, and that the landlords and their agents were responsible for the degradation of these unfortunate beings.