I know, but still, that just strikes me as really dangerous. Was there a time period given? Supposedly around the time of Vincent de Paul, there was a French saying 'the best way to get to hell was to become a priest'.
I misremembered the details:
"in 1326 a more violent dispute arose between the inhabitants of Saint Albans and the monastery. It led to an insurrection during which the monastery was twice besieged. The quarrel this time was over the right of the tenants of Saint Albans to grind their corn at home with their hand mills. Five years later, in retaliation, Abbot Richard had all the houses searched and the millstones seized. The stones were brought to the monastery, where the Abbot had the courtyard paved with them, for humiliation of the common people. Their bitterness remained and when fifty years later, in 1381, the Peasant's Revolt broke out led by Wat Tyler, the people of Saint Albans rushed eagerly to the monastery to break up the millstone courtyard, the symbol of their humiliation."
So they rebelled, he put down the rebellion, then they put up with it for half a century until there was some other unrest going on. Every society has some collection of numpties everyone has too much respect for, and puts up with all sorts of shit from - until one day they don't, and buildings burn and guardsmen are hanged. And then who knows how things will turn out.
The context of the quote is the introduction of the water-powered
fulling mills. As in with industrialisation 1800 to present, bringing in new technology - especially water mills - in the middle ages took production out of homes and into dedicated facilities far from homes, and made a lot of people unemployed. If you added a drought, a flood, a plague or war or massive hikes in taxes to that, you got famines, rebellions and so on.