The prior concluded with considerable vehemence. No one was more theoretically conservative than he, and although, in this time of anarchy, he approved of Hyla's deed, yet it certainly shocked his instinctive respect for _les convenances_. It would have been difficult to find a better creature than the fat prior of Icomb, a man more truly charitable, or of a more pious life. But, had the course of this story been different, and had Hyla lived his life at the monastery, he could never have risen in the social scale. If the prior had discovered the force of the man, his potentialities as a social force, he would have sternly repressed them. Hyla's duty was to work, and be fed for his work. The Catholic Church, with its vast hierarchy, its huge social machinery, crushed all progress in the direction of freedom. No doubt, Richard Espec, worthy gentleman though he was, would have been considerably surprised if he had been told that he would be as Hyla, and no more, in heaven. We hear too much about the humility of the priesthood in the early Middle Ages. Of course, the great political churchmen, such as Henry of Winchester or Thurston of York, were petty kings, with ceremonial courts and armies. People knelt as they passed, because they were princes as well as priests. But there is a delusion that the ordinary monk or priest was, in effect, a perfect radical, holding doctrines of equality, at any rate, as far as he himself was concerned. Nothing of the sort was possible in the face of the one crushing social fact of serfdom. Richard Espec would have washed Hyla's feet with pleasure--there was precedent, and it was a formal act of humiliation. At the same time, he would not have made his bed in Hyla's hut or sat with him at meat. The sub-prior received his superior's remarks with due reverence, and the talk glided into other channels. While they sat there came footsteps running down the cloister, and then a beating at the door. A young monk entered, breathless, and knelt before the prior.