It was easy to see why advocates of such a policy could hope for success among the Ukrainians in Poland. Over a period of years many of the leading nobles had been Polonized, but they still retained all their former rights in making Church appointments, rights little more extensive than those possessed by the Roman Catholic nobles. Why should they not exercise these rights and place Roman Catholic sympathizers in responsible positions? Similarly the King of Poland assumed the various rights of the older Orthodox princes who had been expelled from their lands at the period of conquest. In the minds of the thinkers of the sixteenth century, such actions were not only moral and consistent but necessary. It suited the religious and political leaders of the century and it was powerfully reinforced by the efforts of the Jesuits. More and more the Kings and the magnates put pressure upon the Orthodox bishops. They even went so far in the early part of the century as to require heavy payments from the Orthodox before they would consent to the appointment of a new Orthodox bishop even for Lviv. At the same time every change in the constitution of Poland tended to increase the power of the lords and to decrease those of the peasants and the townspeople. The peasants saw themselves forced to harder and harder conditions of living, until they became practically serfs, living on the land of their masters and liable for more and more unpaid labor. The townspeople gradually lost most of their privileges. They were forbidden to buy land, if they were Ukrainians, outside of certain Ukrainian quarters, and the flourishing trade that had been built up fell to almost nothing. The Polish townspeople were little better off and the general history of the towns during the century was one of uninterrupted decay. Yet for the Poles religion was not impaired, since their clergy were influential in the state. For the Ukrainians, with the loss of their aristocracy, the diminution of their privileges left them without any defenders. What was needed was a reorganization of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church but this was difficult. Many of the higher ecclesiastics, bishops and heads of monasteries, were hardly willing to give up their own practical independence. At the same time the brotherhoods, who were the best organized and most intelligently conscious members of the Orthodox Church, sought for ways to make their influence felt, and as their school system grew, so did their claims and their potentialities.