Various clerics in Orléans, one of them high in royal favour, were said to have claimed ‘there was no such thing as the Church’;1 the inhabitants of a castle near Milan, swearing themselves to chastity, had laid claim to a purity that put married priests to shame; a peasant, only a hundred miles from Cambrai, had dreamed that a swarm of bees entered his anus, and revealed to him the iniquities of the clergy.
