In 1097 the Duke of Burgundy learned that Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury was about to pass through his territory with a rich escort on his way to Rome. The usual ambush was laid and the party were held up. As the duke hastened to spoil his victims, crying out--"Where is the archbishop?" he turned and saw Anselm, impassive on his horse, gazing sternly at him. In a moment the savage and lawless duke was transformed to a pallid, stammering wretch with downcast eyes, begging permission to kiss the old man's hand and to offer him a noble escort to safeguard him through his territory. It was the moral influence of prelates such as this and monks such as St. Bernard that enabled the hierarchy to enforce the celibacy of the clergy, to cleanse the bishoprics and abbeys, to wrest the privilege of conferring benefices from lay potentates and feudal seigneurs who bartered them for money, and to make and unmake kings. The end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries saw the culmination of the power of the reformed orders. All over France, religious houses--the Grande Chartreuse, Fontevrault, Citeaux, Clairvaux--sprang up as if by enchantment. Men and women of all stations and classes flocked to them, a veritable host of the Lord, "adorning the deserts with their holy perfection and solitudes by their purity and righteousness." St. Bernard, the terror of mothers and of wives, by his austerity, his loving-kindness,[42] his impetuous will and masterful activity, his absolute faith and remorseless logic, his lyric and passionate eloquence, carried all before him and became the dictator of Christendom. He it was who with pitying gesture as of a kind father, his eyes suffused with tender joy, received Dante from the hands of Beatrice in the highest of celestial spheres, and after singing the beautiful hymn to the Virgin, led him to the heaven of heavens, to the very ecstasy and culmination of beatitude in the contemplation and comprehension of the triune God Himself. But religious no less than seculars are subdued by what they work in. Already in the tenth century Richer complained that the monks of his time were beginning to wear rich ornaments and flowing sleeves, and with their tight-fitting garments[43] looked like harlots rather than monks. [Footnote 42: He was said to be "kind even to Jews."] [Footnote 43: The indignant scribe is most precise: they walked abroad _artatis clunibus et protensis natibus_.] In the polluting atmosphere of Philip's reign matters had grown worse. St. Bernard denounced the royal abbey of St. Denis as "a house of Satan, a den of thieves." "The walls of the churches of Christ were resplendent with colour but His poor were naked and left to perish; their stones were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to charm the eyes of the rich."