canons of Rouen wandering about the cathedral and chatting with women during service, the nuns of Saint-Sauveur with their pet dogs and squirrels, and those of other convents celebrating the festival of the Innocents with dance and song and unseemly mirth, the monks of Bocherville without a Bible among them to read. It is hard to believe that there was anything new in the disorders which this upright archbishop chronicles place by place and year by year—ignorance, drunkenness, and incontinence among the parish and cathedral clergy, lax discipline, loose administration, and neglect of learning in the monasteries and nunneries. What was old in the time of Rabelais was probably old in the thirteenth century, and there is abundant evidence of abuses in the mediæval church, in Normandy and elsewhere. What we want most to know is how general these abuses were and how many there were to counteract them like Chaucer's 'povre persoun of a toun,' who taught "Cristes lore and his apostles twelve," but first "folwed it himselve." Data of this sort are always lacking in sufficient amount for any moral statistics, and they must be supplemented and interpreted by the evidence which has reached us of popular piety and devotion. Such are the processions of priest and people throughout the diocese to the cathedrals at Whitsuntide, the miraculous cures of disease by Our Lady of Coutances, and the extraordinary burst of contrition, religious enthusiasm, and zeal for good works which broke forth at the building of the spires of Char-
