Ecclesiastical life in England had, in fact, never really recovered from the Danish _débâcle_ of the later ninth century: monasteries had been burnt, plundered, impoverished: recovery had been but slow and partial: slackness and sloth were almost universal. It is not known how far in the earlier English monasteries the Benedictine rule and the common cœnobitic life had ever been strictly followed, but when Dunstan rose to influence there were practically no religious houses where monks were to be found; in their place non-resident canons, or seculars, as they were called, had become the established order of things, and the various annalists have painted for us in vivid colours the laxity and debased standard of the ordinary church life of the day. The canons, or ‘seculars,’ released from the severe toil and discipline of the Benedictine rule, allowed themselves numerous indulgences, and were in many cases even married. Loving comfort and ease, they neglected the church, and the daily services were grudgingly carried out by deputy, by ‘vicars’ paid, and paid poorly at that, to conduct the services while the absentee canons expended the income of their ‘prebends’ elsewhere at their ease. Thus Wulfstan tells us-- There were then in the Old Minster, wherein is the bishop’s stool, canons of disreputable manners and morals, so swollen with pride and insolence that numbers of them would not condescend to celebrate the masses when their regular turn came, who turned adrift the wives they had unlawfully married, and took others in their stead, and who gave themselves up to gluttony and drunkenness. It is always interesting to note the snowball principle of accretion in the various annalists’ accounts, and the fifteenth-century Winchester annalist improves upon this picture, depicting them as ... canons, canonical only in name, who neglected their duties in the church, and left the pious labours of vigils and the service of the altar to be performed vicariously, absenting themselves from the sight of the church, or even, so to speak, from the sight of God. Bare was the church within and without. The vicars, scarcely able to keep body and soul together, could not give: the prebendaries would not. Hardly could you find one who, except on compulsion, would offer a shabby altar cloth or present a chalice worth a few shillings. Be this as it may--and the monkish chroniclers would not be likely to spare the seculars--the standard of life was terribly lax, and Dunstan, originally abbot of Glastonbury, then Bishop of Worcester, and finally archbishop, set out, with King Edgar’s sanction, on the path of reform, and Æthelwold assisted heart and soul in the movement.