There is something which must needs move our sympathy when we see the passion of pitying love with which these simple-hearted sons of warriors received the story of the suffering Saviour. But, as has been already said, the tide of religious emotion which had flowed so freely in the seventh was already beginning to ebb in the eighth century. This decay of religious life in England, or at any rate in Northumbria, is vouched for in the memorable letter which Bede wrote shortly before his death to his friend Egbert, who had just been consecrated bishop and was shortly to become Archbishop of York. The letter itself is a model of wise exhortation, boldly but respectfully tendered by an aged saint to a man, his junior in years but his superior in ecclesiastical rank. Bede is evidently sure of the goodness of his pupil’s intentions, but anxious lest he should not have sufficient force of character to make head against the corruption of the times. Ever since the death of King Aldfrid, which happened thirty years before (705), the decline in morals had gone on at a rapid pace. He holds the bishops largely responsible for this degeneracy. They have insisted on retaining dioceses larger than any one man could possibly administer. They have, for filthy lucre, given their consent to all sorts of grants which should never have been made. They and their clergy have clutched eagerly at the shepherd’s hire, leaving the flock unfed. “There are, as we hear, many farms and villages on lonely mountains or in brambly wildernesses, in which for many years the face of a priest has never been seen, and neither baptisms nor confirmations are ever performed, and yet not one of the dwellers in such places is ever allowed to escape from the payment of church-dues.” But the greatest scandal of all in Bede’s day seems to have been the foundation of pseudo-monasteries by noble and wealthy laymen, who intended anything rather than the leading of a life of religious austerity. Intent apparently on securing the creature-comforts which a well-endowed monastery afforded; intent also on escaping under the pretence of a religious life the duties of military service for their king and country, these pseudo-abbots would obtain a large grant of land from the king, and would there rear their unholy convents, in which, freed from all laws, human or divine, they would live their lives of licentious ease, waited on by troops of menial monks, who had generally been themselves expelled from genuine monasteries, by reason of their irregular lives. Nay, sometimes these impostors would go even further, and persuade a foolish king to grant them a piece of land adjoining the first donation, and would there erect a nunnery in which their wives might, without taking any regular vows, pretend to be the guides and rulers of maidens vowed to Christ.