CHAPTER I

WANDERING PREACHERS AND FRIARS

While the inward consciousness of common wants and longings for better days spread everywhere, by means of that crowd of work-people whom we find in England ceaselessly on the move in spite of statutes, the guiding ideas were sown broadcast by another kind of roamer, the preachers. Sprung also from the people, they had studied; as we have seen it was not necessary to be rich in order to go through the course at Oxford; the villeins even sent their children there, and the Commons, of scant liberalism as we know, protested against this emancipation of another kind, this advancement by means of learning, “avancement par clergie.” Preventive measures, they thought, were indispensable to save “the honour” of the freemen of the realm, by which they meant privilege; ideas of honour have changed. But, even then, it was going too far, and the king, who had after all learnt a lesson in 1381, rebuked the Commons with a “le roi s’avisera” which {284} was then, and is to-day, the form of royal refusal.[384] These clerks knew what was the condition of the people; they knew the miseries of the poor, which were those of their father and mother and of themselves; the intellectual culture they had received enabled them to transform into precise conceptions the general aspirations of the tillers of the soil. The former are not less necessary than the latter to every important social movement; if both are indispensable to the making of the tool, handle and blade, it is these definite views which form the blade.

The roaming preachers knew how to sharpen it, and they were numerous. Those whom Wyclif sent to popularize his doctrines,[385] his “simple priests,” or “poor priests,” did just what others had done before them; they imitated their forerunners, and no more confined themselves to expounding the difficult and not always democratic theories of their master than the mendicant friars, or monks, or secular priests, friends of the revolution, strictly kept to the precepts of the gospel. Their sympathies were with the people, and they showed it in their discourses. Wyclif contributed to the increase of these wanderers; his people came from the same stock as the others; if it was easy for him to find clerks ready to act as his missionaries, the reason was that many in the kingdom were already prepared for such a task, and only awaited their opportunity.[386] The revolutionary {285} leader John Ball was a secular priest, and so was the well-known Lollard, William Thorpe.

All, in fact, did the same kind of work. For different motives and with different aims, they led to the same results: the belief that the State, the Church, the Government, the Court, the rule of the masters, whether spiritual or temporal, were not what they should be, and that a change _must_ come. Doubts and discontents always help each other; whoever strikes at the tree shakes the tree. Wyclif’s theory, “both before and after the rising, was that temporal lords had a right to their property, but that churchmen had no right to theirs.”[387] His teachings helped, however, to spread doubts as to the legitimacy of both. Though it had nothing to do with Lollard tenets, the diffusion thereof was facilitated by the papal schism of 1378: another great tree that was shaken.

Men able to address a crowd scoured the country, drawing together the poor and attracting them by harangues filled with what people who suffer always like to hear. The statute passed just after the revolt clearly shows how much the influence of the wandering preachers was feared. Their dress even and manner of speech are described; these malcontents have an austere aspect, they go “from county to county, and from town to town in certain habits under dissimulation of great holiness.” They dispense of course with the ecclesiastical papers which regular preachers ought to carry; they are “without the licence of our Holy Father the Pope, or of the Ordinaries of the {286} places, or other sufficient authority.” They make themselves heard, and their successors to this day have never ceased to follow suit, “not only in churches and churchyards, but also in markets, fairs, and other open places where a great congregation of people is.” Their real subject is not dogma, but the social question; on their lips the religious sermon becomes a political harangue. “Which persons,” the statute says, “do also preach divers matters of slander, to engender discord and dissension betwixt divers estates of the said realm as well spiritual as temporal, in exciting of the people, to the great peril of all the realm.” They are cited to appear before the ecclesiastic authority, the ordinaries, but refuse to “obey to their summons and commandments.” Let the sheriffs and others of the king’s officers henceforth watch with care these wandering orators and send to prison those unable to show proper certificates.[388]

We may gain an idea of their speeches by recalling the celebrated harangue of the priest John Ball,[389] the most stirring of these travelling orators. Certainly, in the Latin phrase of the “Chronicle of England,” his thoughts are given too solemn and too correct a form, but all that we know of the circumstances matches so well his undoubted purports, that his actual speech cannot have differed, in its trend at least, from what the chronicler has transmitted to us. The popular saying quoted before serves as his text, and he developes it in this manner:

“At the beginning we were all created equal; it is the tyranny of perverse men which has caused servitude to arise, in spite of God’s law; if God had willed that there should be serfs He would have said at the beginning {289} of the world who should be serf and who should be lord.”[390]

What made Ball powerful was that he found his best weapons in the Bible; quoting it he appealed to the good sentiments of the lowly, to their virtue, their reason; he showed that the Divine Word accorded with their interest; they would be “like the good father of a family who cultivates his field and plucks up the weeds.” The same ideas are attributed to him by almost all the chroniclers. Froissart uses to describe his doings almost the same words as the statute already quoted. He represents him when he found a congregation of people, especially on Sundays, after mass, preaching in the open air sermons similar to that in the “Chronicon Angliæ”: “This preest,” says Froissart, “used often tymes on the sondayes after masse, whanne the people were goynge out of the mynster, to go into the cloyster and preche, and made the people to assemble about hym, and wolde say thus: A ye good people, the maters gothe nat well to passe in Englande, nor shall nat do tyll every thyng be common, and that there be no villayns nor gentylmen. . . . What have we deserved or why shulde we be kept thus in servage? we be all come fro one father and one mother, Adam and Eve: whereby can they say or shewe that they be gretter lordes than we be, savynge by that they cause us to wyn and labour for that they dispende . . . They dwell in fayre houses, and we have the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynde in the feldes; and by that that cometh of our labours they kepe and maynteyne their estates. . . . Lette us go to the kyng, he is yonge, and shewn hym what servage we be in. . . . Thus Johan sayd on sondayes whan the people issued out of the churches in the vyllages . . . and so they wolde murmure one with another in the feldes and in the wayes as {290} they went togyder, affermyng howe Johan Ball sayd trouthe.”[391]

So the enthusiastic multitude promised to make him archbishop and chancellor of that kingdom in which he dreamed there should be “equal liberty, equal rank, equal power” for all; but he was taken, drawn, hanged, beheaded, and quartered,[392] and his dream remained a dream.

Meanwhile, politics apart, there might yet be found in the fourteenth century some of God’s elect who, alarmed by the crimes of the world and the state of sin in which men lived, left their cells or the paternal roof to go about among villages and towns and preach conversion. There remained some, but they were rare. Contrary to others, these did not speak of public affairs, but of eternal interests; they had not always received sacred orders; they acted as volunteers to the celestial army. Of this sort was the before mentioned Richard Rolle, of Hampole, whose life was partly that of a hermit, partly of a wandering preacher. He was neither monk, nor doctor, nor priest; when young, he had abandoned his father’s house to go and lead a contemplative life in solitude. There he meditated, prayed, and mortified himself; crowds came to his cell to listen to his exhortations; he had ecstatic trances; his friends took off his ragged cloak, mended it, and put it back on his shoulders without his perceiving it. He later left his retreat, and for a long time travelled over the north of England, becoming a wanderer, “changing place continually,” preaching to lead men to salvation. He finally settled at Hampole, where he ended his life in seclusion, writing incessantly, and edifying the neighbourhood by his devotion; he died the year of the great plague, 1349. Scarcely was he dead than his tomb attracted pilgrims, pious people brought offerings there, miracles were performed. In the {291} nuns’ convent at Hampole, which drew from the vicinity of his tomb great honour and profit, an “Office of St. Richard, the hermit,” was composed, as we have seen, to be sung when he should be canonized. But the office of the old hermit and itinerant preacher has never had occasion to be sung down to the present day.[393]

The wandering preachers met with in the villages were not always Lollards sent by Wyclif, nor inspired men who, like Rolle of Hampole, held their mission from their conscience and from God; they were often members of an immense and powerful caste sub-divided into several orders, that of the mendicant friars. The two principal branches were the Dominicans, Preachers, or Black friars, and the Franciscans, Friars minor or Grey friars, both established in England in the thirteenth century,[394] the “men of this [world] that most wide walken,” said Langland.[395]

The immortal satires of Chaucer should not blind us to the initial merit of these orders, nor cause us to see in the members thereof, at all times, nothing but impudent and idle vagabonds, at once impious, superstitious, and greedy—

“A Frere ther was, a wantoun and a merye; * * * * * Ful wel biloved, and famulier was he {292} With frankeleyns overal in his cuntre, And eek with worthi wommen of the toun; * * * * * Ful sweetly herde he confessioun, And plesaunt was his absolucioun. He was an esy man to yeve penance, Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance; For unto a povre ordre for to geve Is signe that a man is wel i-shreve. * * * * * He knew wel the tavernes in every toun, And every ostiller or gay tapstere.”[396]

In Chaucer’s days, such friars were many, but some better ones could also be met; not only those, rare indeed in the fourteenth century, who continued the traditions of their founder, living among the poor, poor as they, and withal wise, devout, and compassionate: Chaucer’s friar was of a different sort; he avoided acquaintance with “a lazer or a beggere,” unwilling to deal “with such poraile.” But even among those who lived careless of the rule, some were at work whose thoughts, dangerous {293} as they might be, were not so base, those friars namely who, when the moment came, could be confounded with the simple priests of their enemy Wyclif, and who were certainly comprised along with them in the statute of 1382. Certain it is that many friars, in their roaming career, preached in the market place, just like John Ball, the new doctrines of emancipation. Hence they alone among the clergy, at the hour of the great revolt, still preserved a certain popularity among the lowly; and the monastic chroniclers, their natural enemies, complacently paraded in their narratives this new grievance against these detested orders.[397] Langland, who cursed the revolt, cursed also the friars for having a share of responsibility in it. Envy has whispered into their ears and said: study logic, law, and the hollow dreams of philosophers, and go from village to village proving that all property ought to be in common—the very teaching of John Ball:

“and proven hit by Seneca That alle thyng under hevene · ouhte to beo in comune.”[398]

Always armed with good sense, Langland plainly declares that the author of these subversive theories lies; the Bible says, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” Formerly the life of the friars was exemplary, Charity dwelt among them; this was in the days of the great saint of Assisi, the friend of men, the friend of birds, the friend of all that had been created and could suffer.[399] {294}

And, indeed, what a holy mission their founder had given them! Coarsely dressed, barefoot, getting only such food as was freely offered them, they were to go into the towns and visit the poorest, most densely populated and unhealthiest suburbs, to seek out the lost.

“And all the brothers,” said Francis, in his rule, “are to be clad in mean habits, and may blessedly mend them with sacks and other pieces; whom I admonish and exhort, that they do not despise or censure such men as they see clad in curious and gay garments and using delicate meats and drinks, but rather let every one judge and despise himself.” They must never quarrel, but be “meek, peacable, modest, mild and humble. . . . And they are not to ride unless some manifest necessity or infirmity oblige them. Whatsoever house they go into, they shall first say, ‘Peace be unto this house,’ and, according to the Gospel, it shall be lawful for them to eat of all meats that are set before them.” They must beg in order to get the necessaries of life, but they must receive them in kind, never in money. “The brothers shall not make anything their own, neither house nor place, nor any other thing; and they shall go confidently to beg alms like pilgrims and strangers in this world, serving our Lord in poverty and humility.”[400]

All the miseries, all the hideous blemishes of humanity, every kind of outcasts, the physical or moral lepers, were to have their sympathy; and the lower classes in return would love and venerate them, and grow morally better, owing to their word and example. Eccleston relates that a friar minor once put on his sandals without permission to go to matins. He dreamt afterwards that he was arrested by robbers, who cried out, “Kill him! Kill him!”

“But I am a friar minor,” said he, sure of being respected. {295}

“Thou liest, for thou art not barefoot.”[401]

The first of their duties was to remain poor, in order to be able, having nothing to lose, fearlessly to use firm language to the rich and powerful of the world. When on his death-bed, in 1253, wise and courageous Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, a great friend of theirs, and because a friend of theirs, reminded them of their rule, appropriately quoting a line of Juvenal’s:

“Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator.”

The friars were to be like the traveller without money, whose peace of mind is never disturbed by meeting robbers.[402]

St. Francis had not wished his friars to be men of learning and study; he was afraid especially of those subtle theological and metaphysical researches which uselessly absorbed the life of so many great clerics. Others enough, he thought, would devote themselves to such speculations; he wanted to fill a gap and in this line there was no gap. His rule was so strict that the famous Roger Bacon, who belonged to his order, had to apply to the pope to be permitted to use ink and parchment.[403] What the saint desired was to send throughout the world an army of missionaries who would devote themselves materially and morally to the welfare, body and soul, of all the weary, the derelict, the dregs of humanity. Thus practised, with no room left for the pride of knowledge, disinterestedness was the more absolute, servitude the {296} more voluntary, and the effect on the masses the greater. The subtlety of teachers was not necessary for the fulfilling of this task; and the striking example of the poverty of the consoler, heedless of his own troubles, was the best of consolations. Above all, the vanity of the apostle must be killed, the greatness of his merit must be apparent to God only. With a heart so purified he would necessarily have a sufficient comprehension of the problems of life and of the high moral aims accessible even to the lowest to be naturally eloquent; the study of the “Summæ,” in repute, was useless.

But too many dangers surrounded the sublime foundation, and the first was knowledge itself. “The Emperor Charles, Roland and Oliver,” once said the Saint, “and all the paladins and all strong men, have pursued the infidel in battle till death, and with great pains and labour have won their memorable victories. The holy martyrs died struggling for the faith of Christ. But in our days there are people who seek glory and honour among men simply by the narration of the deeds of heroes. In like manner there are some among you who take more pleasure in writing and preaching on the merits of the saints than in imitating their works.” This reply St. Francis made to a novice who wished to have a psalter. He humorously added, “When you have a psalter you will wish to have a breviary, and when you have a breviary you will sit in a chair like a great prelate, and will say to your brother, ‘Brother, fetch me my breviary.’”[404]

The popularity of the friars had soon become immense,[405] {297} and it was found that they had monopolized in England everything that concerned religion.[406] By a quite human contradiction—let Brutus be Cæsar—their poverty had invited riches, and their self-denial power; the hovels where they lodged at first had become sumptuous monasteries with chapels as large as cathedrals; the rich wanted to be buried there, in tombs chiselled with the latest refinements of the florid Gothic. Their apologists of the fifteenth century relate with admiration that in their fine library at London, for in spite of the rule they had a fine library, there was a tomb adorned with four cherubims;[407] that their church, begun in 1306, was three hundred feet long, ninety-five wide, and sixty-four feet high, with the columns all of marble as well as the pavement. Kings and princes had enriched the building; some had given the altars, others the stalls; Edward III, “for the repose of the soul of the most illustrious Queen Isabella, buried in the choir” (who had ended her immoral life in the habit of the Santa Clara nuns), repaired the great middle window, blown down by the wind. In the same church was preserved the heart of Queen Eleanor, mother of Edward I. Relating that it was there, Rishanger, a monk of Saint Albans and a contemporary, made thereupon a remark, which Walsingham, also a monk of St. Albans, gleefully reproduced in his “Historia Anglicana”: “Her body was buried in the monastery of Ambresbury, but her heart in London, in the church of the Minorites, who, like all friars of every order, claim for themselves something of the bodies of any powerful persons dying; after the manner of the dogs assembling {298} round corpses, where each one greedily awaits his portion to devour.”[408] Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, had given for the same building twenty trees from his forest of Tunbridge. Rich merchants, the mayor, the aldermen, followed suit. The names of the donors were inscribed on the windows, and Langland was indignant, and recalled the precept, “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” We learn thus that the third window on the west had been given by Walter Mordon, “stoke-fyschmonger,” and Mayor of London. The second window on the south was due to John of Charlton, knight, and his wife, whose arms figured in it; the fourth to Walter de Gorst, fellmonger of London; the fifth to the Earl of Lancaster; the fourth on the west to “various collections, and thus it does not bear a name.” One of the donors is styled the special father and friend of the friars minor.

It could be but a delight for the Wyclifites to reproach the friars with all these mundane splendours; Wyclif revels in it:

“Freris bylden mony grete chirchis and costily waste housis, and cloystris as hit were castels, and that withoute nede. . . . Grete housis make not men holy, and onely by holynesse is God wel served.” Those convents are “Caymes Castelis.”[409]

Interminable lists, too, of cardinals, bishops, and kings who have belonged to the order are drawn up, not forgetting even “certain persons of importance in the world,”—the very antithesis of their founder’s intent. Finally, they enumerate the dead who at the last moment assumed the habit of the friars: “Brother Sir Roger {301} Bourne, knight, buried at Norwich in the friars’ habit, 1334.”[410]

The pride and riches of the Dominicans are just as great. The author of “Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede,” towards the end of the fourteenth century, accurately describes one of their monasteries, the splendid columns to be seen there, the sculptures, paintings, and gildings that adorn the chapter house, so beautiful that it obviously reminds the author of the one at Westminster, or of the painted chamber, “la chambre peinte,” where at times Parliament sat:

“As a Parlement-hous · y-peynted aboute,”

the magnificent stained glass windows ornamented with the arms of the nobles or the mark of the merchants who have given them (“merkes of marchauntes”), and “lovely ladies,” their bronze figures lying on the slabs, “in many gay garmentes,” the imposing tombs of knights heightened with gold.[411]

The proportions are reversed; as great as the modesty required by the holy founder was now the pride. The faults Chaucer reproaches them with creep in among them; they become interested, greedy, coarse men of the world. The necessity for them to live among the laity had been one of their chief dangers; they were to save the laity, but were instead corrupted by it; they caught the plague that they were to cure. Before even the middle of the {302} thirteenth century, one of them had had a revelation that “Demons celebrated every year a council against the order, and had found three means (to pervert it), that is, intercourse with women, the receiving of useless persons, and the handling of money.”[412]

Mendicity is now their trade, which some practice well, others better; miracles of self-denial were demanded of them, and behold, on the contrary, prodigies of selfishness. It is no longer religion, it is their order which must be promoted; they preach not on behalf of Christ, but on behalf of their convent; the reversal is complete. All borrow largely from the treasure of good works amassed by their first apostles and spend it madly. The respect of the multitude lessens, their renown for holiness declines; they cast into the other scale of the balance so many faults and disorders that it overweighs. And what remains henceforth? Superstition replaces devotion; some, in spite of the rule, have studied metaphysics and sciences, the _trivium_, the _quadrivium_[413]; for a larger number, however, it is not learning but a gross materialism that veils the superhuman ideal of Francis of Assisi. Contact with their habit is equivalent to a good deed; if the dress is assumed on the death-bed the demons will take flight. Numberless visions have revealed to them these articles of a new faith: “Thei techen lordis and namely ladies,” says Wyclif, “that if they dyen in Fraunceys habite, thei schul nevere cum in helle for vertu thereof.”[414] {303}

And so it came to pass that, not only poets like Chaucer and Langland, not only reformers like Wyclif, but also the universities[415] and the monks of the old-established orders, waged open war against the friars. To which the monks were moved partly, it is true, by jealousy, when they saw these newly created brotherhoods rising in importance, in numbers and in wealth, but partly, also, by the sight of undeniable abuses and worldliness. In such an authoritative work as the “English History,” written in St. Albans Abbey by Chaucer’s contemporary, Thomas Walsingham, the present state and behaviour of the friars is thus described: “The friars, unmindful of their profession, have even forgotten to what end their orders were instituted; for the holy men their law-givers desired them to be poor and free of all kind of temporal possessions, that they should not have anything which they might fear to lose on account of saying the truth. But now they are envious of possessors, approve the crimes of the great, induce the commonalty into error, and praise the sins of both; and with the intent of acquiring possessions, they who had renounced possessions, with the intent of gathering money, they who had sworn to persevere in poverty, call good evil and evil good, leading astray princes by adulation, the people by lies, and drawing both with themselves out of the straight {304} path.” Walsingham adds that a familiar proverb in his time was, “He is a friar, therefore a liar.”[416]

The sanctity of the institution and the unworthiness of many of its members caused it to be at once venerated and detested; however contemptible be the man, what if, after all, the keys of heaven were in his hand? Respect mingled with fear in the feeling for him. Thus poets laughed at the friars, popular story-tellers scouted them; distrust, doubt, contempt spread, extending from the lowly friar to the reverend bishop himself; churchmen were caricatured on the very stalls upon which they sat; Master Reynard was represented delivering a sermon while wearing episcopal insignia, and neither the miniaturist, charged with illuminating an imposing volume of Decretals, nor those who had entrusted him with the work, found anything improper in his satirising on the margin the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy, from bishops to monks or clerks. One of the latter is shown forgetting in the kitchen his sprinkler and bucket of holy water; {305} then remembering what he has come for and going to sprinkle the masters at table, then returning to the kitchen maid.[417] In the same ironical spirit the author of a popular song of the fourteenth century wrote:

“Preste ne monke ne yit chanoun, Ne no man of religioun, Gyfen hem so to devocioun As done thes holy frers. For summe gyven ham to chyvalry, Somme to riote and ribaudery; Bot ffrers gyven ham to grete study, And to grete prayers.”

Several stanzas follow which cannot be quoted.[418]

The people, therefore, fitfully saw in the friars their protectors and allies in case of revolt, while at other times they pursued them in the streets with stones, struck them and lacerated their garments: angels or else devils? they were not sure. “At the same time the preaching friars took to flight because they feared to be maltreated and ruined, because the commonalty bore with them very reluctantly, on account of their proud behaviour, for they did not behave as friars ought.”[419]

“Know ye,” says the king, “that we have understood, that some persons of our kingdom of England, by the instigation of the evil spirit, . . . do and daily strive to do harm and scandal to our beloved in Christ, the religious men, friars of the order of minors, . . . openly and secretly stirring up our people against them to destroy the houses of the said friars, tearing their habits from them, striking some, and ill-treating them, against our peace.”[420]

From another point of view, that of public safety, the {306} Commons were indignant at the number of foreigners among the friars, whom they considered a permanent danger to the State. They requested “that all the alien friars, of whatever habit they might be, should void the realm before the Feast of St. Michael, and if they remained beyond the said feast they should be held as out of the common law,” that is, outlawed.[421]

The friars kept their assurance, they were blessed in the days of their good deeds; now they speak loud and make themselves feared; to the Pope alone they are amenable; they carry their heads high, their power is independent, they have become a church within the Church. Along with the priest who preaches and confesses in his parish is to be seen the wandering friar, who preaches and confesses everywhere; his universal presence and power are sources of conflict; the parish priest finds himself abandoned; the religious wayfarer brings the unknown, the extraordinary, and everybody runs to him. He lays down his staff and wallet and begins to talk; his language is that of the people, the whole parish is present; he busies himself with their eternal welfare, and also with their earthly interests, for lay life is familiar to him, and he can give appropriate advice. But his teaching is sometimes suspicious. “These false prophets,” says not Wyclif, but the Council of Saltzburg in 1386, “by their sermons full of fables often lead astray the souls of their hearers”; they make game of the authority of the parish priests.[422]

To stop their progress proved impossible. The tide rose and swept away the embankments; the excellent had become the worst, _corruptio optimi pessima_, and the old adage was verified to the letter. In spite of grievances, protests, derisive songs and stories, they were met everywhere, in the hut and in the castle, begging from the rich {307} and knocking also at the door of the poor. They sat at the board of the noble, who treated them with consideration; with him they played the part of the fashionable man of religion; they interested, they pleased. Wyclif shows them creeping into familiarity with the great, liking “to speke bifore lordis and sitte at tho mete with hom, . . . also to be confessoures of lordis and ladyes.”[423] Langland, in “Piers Plowman,” is equally severe on “frere Flaterere.” In a Wyclifite treatise of the same period we read, “Thei geten hem worldly offis in lordis courtis, and summe to ben conseilours and reuleris of werris, and also to ben chamberleyns to lordes and ladies.”[424]

Courting popularity among all people, they were different men and acted differently in the villages where they made their rounds; to their wallet they added store of thread, needles, ointments, with which they traded:

“Thei becomen pedleris, berynge knyves, pursis, pynnys and girdlis and spices and sylk and precious pellure and forrouris for wymmen, and therto smale gentil hondis (dogs), to gete love of hem.”[425]

They were more and more the subject of song and cause of mirth, but they did not mind, being the better advertised thereby:

“Thai wandren here and there, And dele with dyvers marcerye, Right as thai pedlers were. Thai dele with purses, pynnes, and knyves, With gyrdles, gloves, for whenches and wyves.”[426]

{308}

The anonymous author, a contemporary of Chaucer, adds:

“I was a frere ful many a day, Therefor the sothe I wate (know). But when I sawe that thair lyvyng Acordyd not to thair preching, Of I cast my frer clothing, And wyghtly went my gate” (my way).[427]

Between the scepticism of the century and blind credulity, superstition flourished. The friars pretended they could sell the merits of their order at retail. They were so numerous and prayed so devoutly, that they had a surplus of piyers in store. Why not distribute this superfluous wealth to men of faith and good will? They did so, for cash of course; it was an exchange of wealth; like will to like. The friars went about the country discounting these invisible riches, and selling to pious souls, under the name of _letters of fraternity_, drafts upon heaven. What is the use of these parchments? they were asked. They give a share in the merits of the whole order of St. Francis.—What are they good for? Wyclif was asked. “Bi siche resouns thinken many men that thes lettris mai do good for to covere mostard pottis.”[428]

Discredited as they were at the end of the century, the friars had not, however, lost all hold over the people. Henry IV usurped the throne, and soon found that he must reckon with the friars. A good many among them were indignant at his enterprise, and some preached here and there, during the first years of his reign, that Richard II was still living and was the true king, and this was one more case, and a very important one, of political ideas vulgarised by wayfarers throughout the country. Henry IV sent them to gaol. One who was brought before him {309} reproached him violently for the deposition of Richard: “But I have not usurped the crown, I have been elected,” said the king.—“The election is null if the legitimate king is living; if he is dead he is dead by thy means; if he was killed by thee, thou canst have any title to the throne.”—“By my head,” cried the prince, “I will have thine cut off!”

The accused were advised to throw themselves on the king’s mercy; they refused, and requested to be regularly tried by a jury. Neither in the city nor in Holborn could any one be found to sit on that jury; inhabitants of Highgate and Islington had to be fetched for the purpose. These men declared the friars guilty; the poor wretches were drawn to Tyburn, hanged, then beheaded, and their heads were placed on London Bridge (1402). The convent was permitted to gather their remains, and bury them in holy ground. The Islington and Highgate jurors came weeping to the Franciscans to implore their pardon for a verdict of which they repented.

For several years, in spite of these punishments, friars continued to preach about the country in favour of Richard II, maintaining that he still lived, although Henry IV had taken care to have a public exhibition in London of the corpse of his assassinated predecessor.[429]

In the fifteenth century the reputation of the friars only grew worse. The abuses of which they were the living personification were among those which best served {310} to draw later adherents to Luther. If there remained in their ranks men who knew how to die, like that unfortunate friar Forest, who was hung alive by chains above a wood fire and slowly roasted, while Bishop Latimer, himself to be burnt later, addressed the dying man “with pious exhortations” to repentance,[430] the mass of them remained the object of universal contempt. This was one of the few points on which it sometimes happened that Catholics and Protestants agreed. Sir Thomas More, beheaded for the Catholic faith, spoke of the friars in the same strain as his adversary Tyndal, strangled for the Protestant faith. In his eyes they were but dangerous vagabonds. He relates, in his “Utopia,” the dispute between a friar and a fool, on the question of pauperism. “‘You will never,’ said the friar, ‘get rid of beggars, unless you also make an edict against us friars.’ ‘Well,’ said the fool, ‘it is already made, the cardinal passed a very good law against you when he decreed that all vagabonds should be seized and made to work, for you are the greatest vagabonds that can be.’ When this was said, and all eyes being turned on the cardinal, they saw he did not disown it; every one, not unwillingly, began to smile, except the friar.”[431]

A class, as historians have observed, which no longer justifies its privileges by its services, is in imminent danger; if it reforms in time, it may be saved; if it does not, it is doomed. In England, the friars were doomed. But nothing is ever entirely lost, and while, for centuries, Chaucer’s merriment made people merry at the expense of the begging orders, it is only fair, before parting with them, to recall such an unprejudiced testimony as that of {311} Bacon, in his essay “Of Love”: “There is in man’s nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars.”

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