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In England Archbishop (later Cardinal) John Morton accused Abbot William of St. Albans of “simony, usury, embezzlement and living publicly and continuously with harlots and mistresses within the precincts of the monastery and without,” and accused the country’s monks of leading “a life of lasciviousness … nay, of defiling the holy places, even the very churches of God, by infamous intercourse with nuns,” making a neighborhood priory “a public brothel.” The bishop of Torcello wrote: “The morals of the clergy are corrupt; they have become an offense to the laity.”

The public perception of the priesthood was in fact appalling. Eustace Chapuys, Charles V’s ambassador in England, wrote the emperor: “Nearly all the people hate the priests.” A Cambridge professor observed that “Englishmen, if called monk, priest, or clerk, felt bitterly insulted.” Everywhere, wrote William Durand, bishop of Mende, the Church “is in ill repute, and all cry and publish it abroad that within her bosom all men, from the greatest even unto the least, have set their hearts upon covetousness. … That the whole Christian folk take from the clergy pernicious examples of gluttony is clear and notorious, since the clergy feast more luxuriously … than princes and kings.” In Vienna the priesthood had once been the objective of ambitious youths. But now, on the eve of the religious revolt, it had attracted no recruits for twenty years.

In his fourteen-volume History of the Popes, Ludwig Pastor concludes that it was virtually impossible to exaggerate the “contempt and hatred of the laity for the degenerate clergy.” Philip Hughes, historian of the Reformation in England, found that in 1514, when the chancellor of the bishop of London was accused of murdering a heretic, the bishop asked Cardinal Wolsey to prevent a trial by jury because Londoners were “so maliciously set in favor of heretical pravity that they will … condemn my clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel.” Even Pope Leo, who, one would have thought, might have felt some responsibility for scandals committed in the name of the Church, observed in 1516, “The lack of rule in the monasteries of France and the immodest life of the monks have come to such a pitch that neither kings, princes, nor the faithful have any respect for them.”

Priests by the thousands found it impossible to live in celibacy. Their solutions varied. In London it was not unknown for women entering the confessional box to be offered absolution in exchange for awkward, cramped intercourse on the spot. In Norfolk, Ripton, and Lambeth, 23 percent of the men indicted for sex crimes against women were clerics, though they constituted less than 2 percent of the population. The most common solution for men unable to bear the strain of continence was to take a mistress. Virtually all German priests kept women. The Roman clergy had a reputation for promiscuity, “but it is a mistake,” writes Pastor, “to assume that the corruption of the clergy was worse in Rome than elsewhere; there is documentary evidence of the immorality of the priests in almost every town in the Italian peninsula. … No wonder, as contemporary writers sadly testify, the influence of the clergy had declined, and in many places hardly any respect was shown for the priesthood.”

There was trouble in the convents, too. The problem seems to have been especially distressing in England. In 1520 eight nunneries there were closed, one because of “the dissolute disposition and incontinence of the religious women of the house, by reason of the vicinity of Cambridge University.” After an examination of twenty-one convents in the diocese of Lincoln, fourteen were blacklisted for “lack of discipline or devotion.” In several, nuns had been found who had been made pregnant by priests. Two reports told of prioresses living in adultery. A diocesan commission filed a separate account of one abbess who had presented a local blacksmith with three sons.

The failure of pontiffs to set a good example was heavily