Just as the bishops had their ample revenues as a reward for services rendered, so they were expected to expend them in a manner appropriate to their high office in church and state. That traditional moralist Edmund Dudley urged that they could do so merely by keeping to the obligations enjoined by the canon law. This required that they should divide their disposable income into three parts, ‘one part thereof for their own living in good household and hospitality, the second in deeds of charity and alms to the poor folk, and specially within their Dioceses and cures … and the third part thereof for the reparations and the building of their churches and mansions’. Such an arrangement should have left little scope for the forms of expenditure of which Dudley disapproved, the purchase of land for their heirs or ‘for marriages of their kinsfolks’. The tripartite division which won his praise was no doubt a valuable point of reference, a standard against which the bishops might judge themselves, but it took little account of the realities of their situation. The first obligation, to keep good household and hospitality, covers only a part of their secular charges. They had to discharge the duties both of a good lord and an obedient subject, the latter including some of their most burdensome and least predictable financial commitments in the form of taxation and the furnishing of men for war.