its Maker, reckoned without his generation; and few, except those with
whom audacity took the place of argument, followed him to the extreme
results of his speculations. The Great Schism rather stayed than promoted
the growth of an English feeling against Rome, since it was now no longer
necessary to acknowledge a Pope who seemed the henchman of the arch-foe
across the narrow seas.

But although the progress of English sentiment towards the desire for
liberation from Rome was to be interrupted by a long and seemingly
decisive reaction, yet in the fourteenth as in the sixteenth century the
most active cause of the alienation of the people from the Church was the
conduct of the representatives of the Church themselves. The Reformation
has most appropriately retained in history a name at first unsuspiciously
applied to the removal of abuses in the ecclesiastical administration and
in the life of the clergy. What aid could be derived by those who really
hungered for spiritual food, or what strength could accrue to the
thoughtless faith of the light-hearted majority, from many of the most
common varieties of the English ecclesiastic of the later Middle Ages?
Apart from the Italian and other foreign holders of English benefices, who
left their flocks to be tended by deputy, and to be shorn by an army of
the most offensive kind of tax-gatherers, the native clergy included many
species, but among them few which, to the popular eye, seemed to embody a
high ideal of religious life. The times had by no means come to an end
when many of the higher clergy sought to vie with the lay lords in warlike
prowess. Perhaps the martial Bishop of Norwich, who, after persecuting
the heretics at home, had commanded in army of crusaders in Flanders,
levied on behalf of Pope Urban VI against the anti-Pope Clement VII and
his adherents, was in the poet Gower's mind when he complains that while

the law is ruled so,