As ye were born.
•••••
I rede that oure hoste schal bygynne,
For he is most envoliped in synne.
Come forth, sire ost, and offer first anoon,
And thou schalt kisse the reliquis everichoon,
Ye for a grote; unbocle anone thi purse.”[439]
Boccaccio, in one of the tales which he represents himself as telling under the name of Dioneo, pictures, he too, an ecclesiastic of great resemblance, moral and physical, to Chaucer’s man. He was called Frà Cipolla, and was accustomed to visit Certaldo, Boccaccio’s village on the hill top, still very much now as it was then, with the writer’s house conspicuous in the main street. “This Frà Cipolla was little of person, red-haired (Chaucer’s pardoner had “heer as yelwe as wex”) and merry of countenance, the jolliest rascal in the world, and to boot, for all he was no scholar, he was so fine a talker and so ready of wit that those who knew him not would not only have esteemed him a great rhetorician, but had {323} avouched him to be Tully himself, or maybe, Quintilian; and he was gossip, or friend, or well-wisher, to well-nigh every one in the country.” If his hearers gave him a little money or corn or anything, he would show them the most wonderful relics; and besides they would enjoy the special protection of the patron saint of his order, St. Anthony: “Gentlemen and ladies, it is, as you know, your usance to send every year to the poor of our lord Baron St. Anthony of your corn and of your oats, this little and that much, according to his means and his devoutness, to the intent that the blessed St. Anthony may keep watch over your beeves and asses and swine and sheep; and, beside this, you use to pay, especially such of you as are inscribed into our company, that small due which is payable once a year.”[440]
Such people had few scruples and knew how to profit by those of others. They released their customers from all possible vows, and remitted any penance, for money; they were a living encouragement to sin, making it so easy to atone for. The more prohibitions, obstacles, or penances were imposed, the more their affairs prospered; they passed their lives undoing what the real clergy did, the richer for it, and the clergy the poorer. The Pope again tells us: “For a small compensation they remit vows of chastity, of abstinence, of pilgrimage beyond the sea to Sts. Peter and Paul of Rome, or to St. James of Compostela, and any other vows.” They allow heretics to re-enter the bosom of the Church, illegitimate children to receive the sacred orders, they remove excommunications and interdicts; in short, as their power comes from themselves alone, they see no reason to restrain it and they use it to the full and without stint. Lastly, they affirm that “it is in the name of the apostolic chamber that they take all this money, and yet they are never known {324} to give an account of it to any one: ‘Horret et merito indignatur animus talia reminisci.’”[441]
They went yet further; they had formed regular associations for systematically speculating on public credulity; thus Boniface IX orders in 1390, that bishops should make an inquiry into everything that concerns these “religious or secular clerics, their people, their accomplices, and their associations”; that they should imprison them without other form of law, “de plano ac sine strepitu et figura judicii”; should make them render accounts, confiscate their receipts, and if their papers be not in order hold them under good keeping, and refer the matter to the sovereign pontiff.