In common with those in worldly professions and businesses the survivors among the clergy appear to have demanded larger stipends than they had previously obtained for the performance of their ecclesiastical duties. Looking back upon the times, and considering how even the small dues of the clergy had been reduced by the death of a large proportion of their people, till they became wholly inadequate for their support, it is impossible to blame them harshly, and not to see that such a demand must inevitably follow upon a great reduction in numbers. At the time, however, by the direction of King and Parliament, the Archbishops and Bishops sought to restrain them from making these claims, in the same way as the King tried to prevent the labourers from demanding higher wages. In his letter to the Bishops of his province Archbishop Islip refers "to the unbridled cupidity of the human race," which ever requires to be checked by justice, unless "charity is to be driven out of the world." "General complaints have come to me," he writes, "and experience, the best teacher of all things, has shown to me that the priests who still survive, not considering that they are preserved by the Divine will from the dangers of the late pestilence, not for their own sakes, but to perform the ministry committed to them for the people of God, and the public utility," like other workmen, through cupidity, neglect the burdens of curates, and take more profitable offices, for which also [p214] they demand more than before. If this be not at once put a stop to "many, and indeed most of the churches, prebends, and chapels of our and your diocese, and indeed of our whole Province, will remain absolutely without priests." To remedy this not only were people urged not to employ such chaplains, but the clergy were to be compelled under ecclesiastical censures to serve the ordinary cures at moderate and usual salaries. It seems not improbable that this measure may have contributed to draw the sympathies of the clergy at large more closely to the people in their struggle for freedom at this period of English history, when both in the civil and ecclesiastical sphere there was the same attempt by public law to impose restraints on natural liberty.