The inquiry into the condition of religious houses under Henry VIII., which led to the suppression of 376 of those establishments, and the transfer of their revenues to the crown, revealed a state of affairs which some Catholics of to-day are reluctant to credit. But, as one of our most accurate and unprejudiced historians has said, the reports of those visitors were so minute and specific, that it is rather a preposterous degree of incredulity to reject their testimony when it bears hard upon the regulars; and the commendation bestowed upon some religious houses as pure and unexceptionable affords a presumption that the censure upon others was not an indiscriminate prejudging of their merits.[255] The abbots were found to keep mistresses, to be the fathers of grown-up sons, who lived with them openly; and the inferior officers were shown to be dishonest men, who obtained their posts by flattery or purchase, and whose vices, when once they were in office, were of the worst kind. They oppressed people with violence and unfair exactions, frequented taverns and other indecorous places, had the company of women in private places and to eat and drink with them.[256] The monks themselves were accused of the gravest breaches of the law—treason, perjury, gambling, drunkenness, “swearing by the body of Christ,” murderous assaults upon each other when they were gambling or in their cups, and even deliberate murder for gain. “A certain knight,” we are told, “had left a hundred marks by will to a certain house, and lay there sick; upon getting well, the monks, that they might not lose the money, plotted his death by poison or suffocation.”[257] Nor were the nuns much better. Amongst the injunctions to the convent of Appleton, A.D. 1489, is one: “Item, that none of your sisters use the alehouse, nor the waterside, where course of strangers dayly resorte.” And in another case the question was asked: “Item, whether any of the sisters be comenly drunke.” They were accused of avarice, brawling, voluptuousness, and sloth; and one of them, the Prioress of Rumsey, was a notorious drunkard.[258] What the monks and nuns did in and about the convents, the wandering friars performed throughout the length and breadth of the land. They were vowed to poverty, and many of them were bright examples of virtue and holiness, going about preaching and ministering to the poor, healing dissensions, and, as well as they were able, protecting the oppressed. But others accumulated property by the most detestable means—some even by procuring pardon for murderers; they were great liars, fraudulent, luxurious, and debauched. “They knew all the taverns, hostelers, and tapsters in every town, but shunned the beggars.” Their time was often spent in intrigues with women, interference with families, and idle and useless gossip.[259]