evident hostility of their employers towards the monks, would be enough to discredit them .as witnesses; and if their evidence stood alone, the utmost it could do would be to leave an uncomfortable doubt on a reader's mind as to whether or not monasteries were all that they should have been or professed to be. But the case is in fact the very reverse of the one here supposed. There is ample proof of the corruption of the monasteries, quite apart from the evidence of Cromwell's commissioners; and it is just the coincidence of their evidence with that of other witnesses, untainted by the suspicion which attaches to them, which alone gives value to it. Into this evidence I do not propose to go at length, for reasons many and obvious. I will but classify it here; but I will claim, and do claim, that those who call for a reversal of the sentence pronounced more than three centuries ago, and persisted in by all English historians of credit down to the time of Lingard, shall meet this evidence fully and fairly before their demand can be even listened to. There is, then, first, and of least importance, the evidence of the satirists and lampooners from Walter de Map and Piers the Ploughman down to 8imon Fish. Depreciate these men as you will, say that they romanced, and even lied boldly and unscrupulously, and I admit at once of them, as of Cromwell's commissioners, that their evidence standing alone might lie worthless. It is its coincidence in the main with other and worthier writers which gives it value. There is, secondly, the evidence to which I have referred in the text—viz., the records of the law courts, as seen in the Ripon Chapter-book and the excerpts from Consistory Court of London. These belong to a quite different category from the above, and the effect which they produce on a mind like that of Bishop Stubbs I have already quoted. Finally, there is evidence supplied by the visitations of Archbishops Morton, Wareham, and Wolsey. Of these, if I mistake not, only a portion of the first has been published. Every effort has been made to minimise its effect, and not without reason; for it establishes in every particular against the most magnificent of all monasteries, the very charges which the commissioners subsequently made against so many others: and this on the authority, not of a rapacious Minister or an unscrupulous commissioner, but of the orthodox episcopal Minister of the most orthodox of fifteenth-century kings, duly authorised by the Pope himself. It has been pleaded that it was half a century before Cromwell's visitation, and there had been ample time for amendment since; and that it applied to one monastery, and that it is unfair to extend its conclusions to others. These allegations have been
