The lives of the early kings and rulers of Britain serve to illustrate the morals of the nation during their respective reigns, not only by exhibiting individual examples where the condition of the masses is hidden from view, but by affording us an index to that condition when it is considered that the manners of the court have, in all ages and all countries, exercised an important influence on those of the people. Augustine converted Ethelbert, but his son Endbald deserted the Christian Church because it refused its sanction to his mother-in-law becoming his wife. It is true that he afterward divorced her, and returned to Christianity, but in this he was influenced rather by satiety than by the promptings of a reviving faith. Many of the other kings of the Heptarchy were as remarkable for the headstrong ardor of their passion as Endbald. Canulph of Wessex had, in the year 784, an intrigue with one of his female subjects, and frequently quitted his court to enjoy her society in the country. During one of these clandestine excursions he was surprised and surrounded in the night by the followers of Kynchard, a rival pretender to the throne, and murdered in the arms of his mistress. In the ninth century prostitution seems to have been a prevailing vice throughout the country, and frequent references are made to it in the discussions of the period. In the arguments used in favor of tithes, in the time of Athelstan, it was held by some canonists that the clergy had a right to demand one tenth of the profits earned by prostitutes in the exercise of their calling. It is but right to add that the Church did not persist in enforcing this extraordinary claim.[290]