Unmitigated serfdom has found no defenders; its misery is admitted, if only tacitly, on all hands; we have seen Imbart de la Tour confessing that it needed the progress of the later fifteenth century to transform the bondman into a real human being. But some men suggest tentatively, and a few have asserted dogmatically, that this improvement was due to the Church, and especially to the monasteries. Yet, whether timidly whispered in our ears or boldly proclaimed from the housetops, this thesis is never supported by the documentary evidence which alone, in the long run, could reconcile thinking people to such an historical paradox. For, on the face of it, the great centuries of serfdom were the great centuries of clerical, and especially of monastic, power. Again, those two or three generations of renascence, during which the serf, the rustic and the artisan bettered their condition very sensibly, resounded with complaints from great and orthodox Catholics that Mother Church had lost her former hold upon the people, and was steering straight for a religious revolution. Again, whereas England was the first great country to break with the medieval Church, she was also one of the least favourable to servitude. The same may be said of Holland; and, whatever social evils the Reformation unsettlement may have brought in its train—whatever, again, may have been the working of that capitalist movement which had begun long before, but which was accelerated by the Reformation—there is no great country whose poor were better off than the English, on the whole, between the Middle Ages and the French Revolution.