Drinking day and night was the general pursuit; vices, the companions of inebriety, followed, effeminating the manly mind." The baronial castles were dens of robbers.

The Saxon chronicler records how men and women were caught and dragged into those strongholds, hung up by their thumbs or feet, fire applied to them, knotted strings twisted round their heads, and many other torments inflicted to extort ransom.
All over Europe, the great and profitable political offices were filled by ecclesiastics.

In every country there was a dual government: 1.
That of a local kind, represented by a temporal sovereign; 2.

That of a foreign kind, acknowledging the authority of the pope, This Roman influence was, in the nature of things, superior to the local; it expressed the sovereign will of one man over all the nations of the continent conjointly, and gathered overwhelming power from its compactness and unity.

The local influence was necessarily of a feeble nature, since it was commonly weakened by the rivalries of conterminous states, and the dissensions dexterously provoked by its competitor.