The influence of the Church was on the wane before the rupture with the papacy was brought about by Henry VIII., and the laity were beginning to assume the positions, liberties, and privileges which had appertained to the clergy as the one scholarly and dominant class of the kingdom. Under the new conditions of liberty in which we find woman, there was no room for the continuance of even the forms of chivalry. Idealized woman no longer existed; she had become practical. Having sought a position of public activity, she had been recognized as possessing the private rights of an individual of the same nature and of similar status as man. It was no longer needful to go to the convent to find the religious or intellectual types of womankind, for religion, benevolence, and literature were no longer identified only with the cloister. However disastrous was the suppression of the monasteries to the little bands of women who wore the habit of the _religieuse_, women in general did not feel the upheaval nearly so much as they did the other social changes, which were not so radical, but were very much more influential in their relation to the destiny of the sex as a whole. Although manners were very free, and nowhere more so than among persons of the higher orders of society, such coarseness is not the true criterion by which to gauge the women of the day. Even if they did not hesitate to use profanity, were adepts at coquetry of an undisguised type, and were guilty of conduct which merited more than the term "indiscreet," it must be borne in mind that they were creatures of their times. While English society was noted for its rudeness and coarseness, it was saved from much of the effeminacy which poisoned the life of its neighbors on the continent. The sixteenth century took a more generous, complimentary, and true view of womankind. In the Middle Ages, she suffered from the exaggerated praise of the knight and the troubadour on the one hand, and on the other from the contempt and contumely of the ecclesiastic. From this equivocal position of being at the same time an angel and a devil she was rescued by the sanity and sincerity of the sixteenth century, and was placed in her true position as a woman, possessed of essentially the same characteristics as men, worthy of like honor, and making appeal for no special consideration excepting that which her sex evoked instinctively from men. The modern idea had begun to prevail, and woman was no longer either worshipped or shunned, but was welcomed as a sharer of the common burdens and joys of life. To continental observers it was marvellous that the English woman should have the large amount of liberty that she enjoyed; and Europeans not understanding the English point of view were apt to construe such liberty as boldness. Thus, one writer from abroad is found commenting upon the sixteenth-century English woman as follows: "The women have much more liberty than perhaps in any other place; they also know well