The lands which the church got from William the Norman, she has held, and always on the same condition—­that she shall be “liege man for life and limb and earthly regard”.  In this you have the whole story of the church of England, in the twentieth century as in the eleventh.  The balance of power has shifted from time to time; old families have lost the land and new families have gotten it; but the loyalty and homage of the church have been held by the land, as the needle of the compass is held by a mass of metal.  Some two hundred and fifty years ago a popular song gave the general impression—­

  For this is law that I’ll maintain
    Until my dying day, sir: 
  That whatsoever king shall reign
    I’ll still be vicar of Bray, sir!

So, wherever you take the Anglican clergy, they are Tories and Royalists, conservatives and reactionaries, friends of every injustice that profits the owning class.  And always among themselves you find them intriguing and squabbling over the dividing of the spoils; always you find them enjoying leisure and ease, while the people suffer and the rebels complain.  One can pass down the corridor of English history and prove this statement by the words of Englishmen from every single generation.  Take the fourteenth century; the “Good Parliament” declares that

Unworthy and unlearned caitiffs are appointed to benefices of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of twenty.  God gave the sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven and shorn.

And a little later comes the poet of the people, Piers Plowman—­

  But now is Religion a rider, a roamer through the streets,
  A leader at the love-day, a buyer of the land,
  Pricking on a palfrey from manor to manor,
  A heap of hounds at his back, as tho he were a lord;
  And if his servant kneel not when he brings his cup,
  He loureth on him asking who taught him courtesy. 
  Badly have lords done to give their heirs’ lands

  Away to the Orders that have no pity;
  Money rains upon their altars. 
  There where such parsons be living at ease
  They have no pity on the poor; that is their “charity”. 
  Ye hold you as lords; your lands are too broad,
  But there shall come a king and he shall shrive you all
  And beat you as the bible saith for breaking of your Rule.

Another step through history, and in the early part of the sixteenth century here is Simon Fish, addressing King Henry the Eighth, in the “Supplicacyon for the Beggars”, complaining of the “strong, puissant and counterfeit holy and ydell” which “are now increased under your sight, not only into a great nombre, but ynto a kingdome.”