Colleges, schools, and hospitals now attracted the money that had previously gone to the monks.
Moreover, the monastic life had fallen on evil days.

The abbeys no longer were centers of learning and of the manufacture of books.

The functions of hospitality and of charity that they still exercised were not sufficient to redeem them in the eyes of the people for the "gross, carnal, and vicious living" with which they were commonly and quite rightly charged.

Visitations undertaken not by hostile governments but by bishops in the fifteenth century prove that much immorality obtained within the cloister walls.

By 1528 {297} they had become so intolerable that a popular pamphleteer, Simon Fish, in his _Supplication of Beggars_, proposed that the mendicant friars be entirely suppressed.
[Sidenote: January 21, 1535] A commission was now issued to Thomas Cromwell, empowering him to hold a general visitation of all churches, monasteries, and collegiate bodies.