It is interesting to notice that two of the three Cistercian Abbeys, although they had not adhered to the earlier rule of their Order to abstain from the appropriation of benefices, had nevertheless managed to avoid the payments to either Bishop or Dean and Chapter which such appropriations usually entailed; and also that they are the only houses for men which did not pay Visitation Fees to the Bishop. But Ronton alone could show no payments to the Archdeacon: his all-embracing activity was evidently not less in the sixteenth century than it had been in the days of John of Salisbury, who characteristically propounded the problem _an possit archidiaconus salvus esse?_ CHAPTER V THE FINANCES OF BURTON ABBEY Many causes had combined to undermine the stability of the religious houses. Their pecuniary usefulness to Pope and King tended to make them the shuttlecock of politics. Their extensive worldly possessions made them objects of jealousy to their neighbours, while the secular spirit with which they became infected when they were drawn into the “full stream of the world” weakened their spiritual influence and made them at once more susceptible to attacks and less capable of effective opposition. Events and tendencies beyond their power to control, like the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses, and the Revival of Learning, in turn exercised a disastrous influence upon them. Seriously affected in wealth, numbers, and efficiency by the Black Death and its consequences; sharing in the lawlessness and demoralisation which accompanied the French War in its later stages, and the Wars of the Roses; lacking the supervision and guidance which active bishops had at any rate attempted, and not always ineffectually, to exercise; in the sixteenth century the religious houses were very different in character from what they had originally been. Even in material things they had changed. They had once been leaders in agricultural development, but their methods were now old-fashioned, ineffective, and out of date. Their wide domains were no longer the sources of wealth they formerly had been. New methods and new outlets for trade had left them behind. Unwise leases only gave temporary relief, and crippled instead of improving resources. All landowners were indeed feeling the effects of the economic changes, and a result was increased claims upon the monasteries by kings and patrons; and the religious houses were not in a condition to make effective opposition. They were not worse than their neighbours: their weakness lay in the fact that they were so little different from them. Up to the present there had been no definite charges of moral delinquency brought by authority against the monastic system. Good or bad, they were looked upon as part of the settled order of things by all except a few theorists and extremists.