[Sidenote: Clerical marriage.]

Furthermore, in contravention of the canons of the Church, the secular
clergy, whether bishops or priests, were very frequently married. The
Church, it is true, did not consecrate these marriages; but, it is
said, they were so entirely recognised that the wife of a bishop was
called Episcopissa. There was an imminent danger that the
ecclesiastical order would shortly lapse into an hereditary social
caste, and that the sons of priests inheriting their fathers'
benefices would merely become another order of landowners.

[Sidenote: Church reform.]

Thus the two evils of traffic in ecclesiastical offices, shortly
stigmatised as simony and concubinage--for the laws of the Church
forbade any more decent description of the relationship--threatened to
absorb the Church within the State. Professional interests and
considerations of morality alike demanded that these evils should be
dealt with. Ecclesiastical reformers perceived that the only lasting
reformation was one which should proceed from the Church herself. It
was among the secular clergy, the parish priests, that these evils
were most rife. The monasteries had also gone far away from their
original ideals; but the tenth century had witnessed the establishment
of a reformed Benedictine rule in the Congregation of Cluny, and, in
any case, it was in monastic life alone that the conditions seemed
suitable for working out any scheme of spiritual improvement. The
Congregation of Cluny was based upon the idea of centralisation;
unlike the Abbot of the ordinary Benedictine monastery, who was
concerned with the affairs of a single house, the Abbot of Cluny
presided over a number of monasteries, each of which was entrusted