These and many other uncouth things were forced upon the credulity of the mediæval peoples and, as we have said, found such general acceptance among the common people that to disbelieve them implied a lamentable want of faith. Many of these outlandish legends, which once obtained so general credence, have been handed down to the present generation. Such are the legends of St. George, Prester John, the Wandering Jew, Antichrist and Pope Joan, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.
With the Church thus superstitious and oppressive, so warped and distorted from that pure religion which Christ gave to his disciples and to the world, it is not strange that learned men, who were above superstition should turn to humanism and to the doctrines of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, seeking in the works of the ancient philosophers a purer guide to holiness than that held out to them by the Church of Rome. Nor was this all. The common people, who had patiently endured it for centuries, were becoming restive under the grievous system, so that the sixteenth century opened with general signs of discontent and dissatisfaction among the peasantry, the unlearned, the agricultural and laboring classes of a large portion of Europe. They bewailed their hard lot and the severity of their rulers, they spoke in anger and scorn of the degeneracy and licentiousness of the clergy, and demanded indignantly to know why they were so absorbed in the world and so negligent of their duties and of the pressing spiritual wants of those around them. This feeling did not spring up suddenly, it was a slow but steady growth extending through many generations. That grand poet Geoffrey Chaucer, more than two hundred years before the time of which we speak, in the first great poems of the mother tongue that England had ever written, had sharply attacked the clerical abuses of his day. He transfixes with his indignant scorn the mummeries and chicanery, the extortions and oppressions practiced by the priesthood, those worthless officers of the Church, who devoted themselves to the pleasures of the chase and to riotous living and worldly schemes, and who spent their time amid the gaities of London, wholly regardless of their neglected charges. So plainly does he picture it to us that we can almost see the pompous monk, the clerk, the choleric reeve, the summoner, and the man whom he holds up for our admiration and reverence, the “poore persoun of a town,” a simple, honest man who faithfully performed his duties, who, living an exemplary Christian life might himself thus the more efficaciously teach it to others and who never divided his attention nor distracted his mind by meddling in ambitious schemes outside his appointed work. These works, voicing the formless opinions of the people had an influence.