treasury registers these annates were not being paid in. In every annual summary report of the Treasury a note is found, stating that the higher clergy, from whom these annates were due, had not paid them in, with the exception of Krasiński, bishop of Cracow, and his successor, Peter Myszkowski.[344] So stubborn were the bishops that the Diet of 1569 threatened them with collecting double the amount from all the delinquent payers, and the Diet of 1576 had to call upon them again to comply with the law regarding annates.[345] By a law of 1496 and 1505 the nobility, with its eye on the wealth of the church, restricted all the higher ecclesiastical offices and preferments to itself and its sons, excluding from them the townspeople and all plebeians.[346] In 1510 and again in 1527, as the needs of the country were steadily growing, it was proposed that the clergy share in carrying the burdens of the country’s defense along with the nobility. In all proposed measures of treasury reform in the sixteenth century the clergy were singled out as the wealthiest estate in the land and placed at the head of the lists of those best able to help bear public burdens. In some of the proposals they were asked to give up their tithes to the needs of the country, and bishops and abbots were urged to contribute the annates to the national treasury.[347] The clergy, however, protested vigorously. They were opposed to any taxation of their property; at the same time they were also reluctant to make voluntary contributions.[348] The collection of the “subsidium charitativum” was always a very difficult matter. Out of the 40,000 florins, which the clergy agreed in 1510 to contribute toward the country’s needs, only 7,000 florins actually came into the national treasury.[349] At the synod of 1577 the clergy manifested the greatest reluctance to make any contribution,[350] and the same thing was true in every case until the end of Poland’s national existence toward the close of the eighteenth century.[351] Yet in justice to the clergy it must be said that once in a while they did manifest unusual liberality. Inspired by the new religious reform movement of the century, the nobility went so far in 1536 and 1537 as to propose confiscation and a sale of all ecclesiastical estates, which were tax-free, and on account of which the nobility had to bear all the heavier public burdens.[352] In 1563 it at last succeeded in securing actual taxation of ecclesiastical property.[353] In 1576 it again protested against the great wealth of the church.[354] And so practically throughout the sixteenth century it struggled under the inspiration and with the help of the religious reform movement against the social and economic oppression and exactions of the Roman clergy.