Edward III, wishing to guard against the reception of unworthy men, forbade the master of Ospringe to admit any brother without special orders; and he removed one for notorious excesses and disobediences.[141] St. Thomas’, Birmingham, was found in a miserable plight, because “vile reprobates assumed the habit that they might continue their abominable lives _sub velamine Religiositatis_, and then forsake it, and cause themselves to be called hermits.”[142] No clerk could be ordained without a “title,” but hospitals were apt to offer this to unproved persons, which was fatal to the tone of the household. St. John’s, Ely, was usually governed by clergy under rule, but in 1454 the Bishop of Dunkeld was collated to the mastership, because no regulars could be found capable of effecting its recovery from ruin and wretchedness. The decline of hospitals was largely owing to the fact that many wardens were non-residents and pluralists. It was actually possible to represent one as having died; [p221] several appointments are revoked because the master is discovered to be “alive and well,” so that it was by “false suggestion that the office was reported as void.” Meanwhile such men were being supported from the hospital funds; an absentee governor of God’s House, Southampton, took his share of the best of its goods, living at its expense in a private mansion in the country. The king nominated to Crown foundations men constantly employed on service elsewhere, and a mastership was a mere stepping-stone to preferment. Not only did clergy hold a benefice and hospital together, but sometimes one man held no less than three hospitals. About 1350, the “lack of clergy by reason of the pestilence” was a serious matter. On this plea the Bishop of Winchester appointed his nephew, a youth in his eighteenth year, as warden at Portsmouth; before long the latter held also the mastership of St. Cross, an archdeaconry, and two canonries. Such practices, begun of necessity, were continued in the century of lax Church life which followed. “One of the boys of the king’s chapel” was given the wardenship of Ilford hospital in 1405. The mischief that happened through the plurality and non-residence of parochial and hospital clergy was at length insisted on in Parliament, when in response to the petition of the Commons, reformation was ordered (1425). St. Nicholas’, Pontefract, had been “ruled by secular masters, some of whom hardly ever went there”; but in 1438 the management was undertaken by the prior of Nostell.