court, with up to thirty cardinals in residence, each with his palace. But it was totally without a spiritual atmosphere. The English parliament officially termed it ‘the sinful city of Avignon’. Its concerns were power, law and money. Petrarch wrote: 'Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee. They have quite forgotten their origins .. Babylon, the home of all vices and misery. . . there is no piety, no charity, no faith, no reverence, no f ear of God, nothing holy, nothing just, nothing sacred. All you have ever heard or read of perfidy, deceit, hardness of pride, shamelessness and unrestrained debauch - in short every example of impiety and evil the world has to show you are collected here. . . here one loses all good things, first liberty, then successively repose, happiness, faith, hope and charity. During the Avignon regime, the central machinery of the Church turned itself primarily into a money-raising organization. In France alone, there were twenty-three papal collectors, and their staffs, distributed through the thirteen archbishoprics; and in the Vatican Library today there survive twenty-two huge manuscript volumes containing petitions and letters concerning appointments settled by papal provisions, the principal source of papal wealth. The sources are really too fragmentary to make accurate estimates of what the Church as a whole, and the papacy in particular, received. In England, the clergy, with one per cent of the population, disposed of about twenty-five per cent of the gross national product. This was about average. In some parts of France and Germany the Church was wealthier and owned one-third to a half of all real estate. The papacy creamed off about ten per cent of the Church's income, in the form of annates; and it received huge sums direct from the public. In the popular mind, the Church was thought to be even wealthier than it actually was. In 1376, for instance, a House of Commons petition stated that sums received from the English clergy by the papacy in the form of annates amounted to five times the revenues of the English crown. This was manifestly absurd. What is clear is that by the beginning of the fifteenth century, the image of the Church was financial rather than spiritual. Adam of Usk, a case- hardened ecclesiastical lawyer from Wales, was nevertheless shocked by his first visit to Rome in c. 1415: 'At Rome everything is bought and sold. Benefices are given not for desert, but to the highest bidder. Everyone with money keeps it in the merchant's bank, to further his advancement. .. . As, therefore, under the old dispensation, miracles ceased when the priests were corrupted by venality, so | fear it will come to pass under the new; the danger standeth daily knocking at the very doors of the church.’ On the whole, this type of criticism tended to come from the clergy. Laymen did not care how clerics got their appointments, provided they were decent men who attended to their duties. But there were certain exactions which affected all classes, and were deeply and increasingly resented. Most of these became obtrusive, and so came to be regarded as abuses, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Perhaps the worst was the mortuary, a clerical byproduct of the feudal heriot or death-duty. It may have been voluntary in origin, as so many of the payments to the Church were; or it may have been based on the presumption that the dead man had failed10 pay all his tithes, so his second-best possession should go to the Church as compensation. It had no foundation in secular Jaw. Indeed, it varied enormously. One common form was for the dead man's family to hand over his bed, or bedding, to the parish priest. This was causing resentment even by the beginning of the thirteenth century. Innocent III wrote to his French legates in 1204: ‘Warn the clergy that they use no burdensome exaction and dishonorable importunity with regard to the bedding which is brought with the corpses to their churches; on the other hand, take care to induce the laity by diligent warning to maintain in these matters that laudable custom.'_ Why was it laudable? It would be hard to think of anything more calculated to scandalize than such a compulsory exaction from a bereaved family. What made it so odious was that it was applied to the very poor. The Abbot of Schwanheim could claim a heriot trom any who had only so much land on his domain as he could set a three-legged stool upon’. On the 6]