History of the English People, Volume II | Page 4

Strangely as the two men differed from each other, their aim
was the same--to convert the heathen, to extirpate heresy, to reconcile
knowledge with orthodoxy, above all to carry the Gospel to the poor.
The work was to be done by an utter reversal of the older monasticism,
by seeking personal salvation in effort for the salvation of their
fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister for the preacher,
the monk for the "brother" or friar. To force the new "brethren" into
entire dependence on those among whom they laboured their vow of
Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the "Begging Friars" were to
subsist solely on alms, they might possess neither money nor lands, the
very houses in which they lived were to be held in trust for them by
others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which welcomed their
appearance swept before it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the
older orders, the opposition of the parochial priesthood. Thousands of
brethren gathered in a few years round Francis and Dominic; and the
begging preachers, clad in coarse frock of serge with a girdle of rope
round their waist, wandered barefooted as missionaries over Asia,
battled with heresy in Italy and Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and
preached and toiled among the poor.
[Sidenote: The Friars and the Towns]
To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was a religious
revolution. They had been left for the most part to the worst and most
ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose sole subsistence lay in

his fees. Burgher and artizan were left to spell out what religious
instruction they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the Church's
ritual or the scriptural pictures and sculptures which were graven on the
walls of its minsters. We can hardly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm
which welcomed the itinerant preacher whose fervid appeal, coarse wit,
and familiar story brought religion into the fair and the market place. In
England, where the Black Friars of Dominic arrived in 1221, the Grey
Friars of Francis in 1224, both were received with the same delight. As
the older orders had chosen the country, the Friars chose the town.
They had hardly landed at Dover before they made straight for London
and Oxford. In their ignorance of the road the first two Grey Brothers
lost their way in the woods between Oxford and Baldon, and fearful of
night and of the floods turned aside to a grange of the monks of
Abingdon. Their ragged clothes and foreign gestures, as they prayed for
hospitality, led the porter to take them for jongleurs, the jesters and
jugglers of the day, and the news of this break in the monotony of their
lives brought prior, sacrist, and cellarer to the door to welcome them
and witness their tricks. The disappointment was too much for the
temper of the monks, and the brothers were kicked roughly from the
gate to find their night's lodging under a tree. But the welcome of the
townsmen made up everywhere for the ill-will and opposition of both
clergy and monks. The work of the Friars was physical as well as moral.
The rapid progress of population within the boroughs had outstripped
the sanitary regulations of the Middle Ages, and fever or plague or the
more terrible scourge of leprosy festered in the wretched hovels of the
suburbs. It was to haunts such as these that Francis had pointed his
disciples, and the Grey Brethren at once fixed themselves in the
meanest and poorest quarters of each town. Their first work lay in the
noisome lazar-houses; it was amongst the lepers that they commonly
chose the site of their homes. At London they settled in the shambles of
Newgate; at Oxford they made their way to the swampy ground
between its walls and the streams of Thames. Huts of mud and timber,
as mean as the huts around them, rose within the rough fence and ditch
that bounded the Friary. The order of Francis made a hard fight against
the taste for sumptuous buildings and for greater personal comfort
which characterized the time. "I did not enter into religion to build
walls," protested an English provincial when the brethren pressed for a

larger house; and Albert of Pisa ordered a stone cloister which the
burgesses of Southampton had built for them to be razed to the ground.
"You need no little mountains to lift your heads to heaven," was his
scornful reply to a claim for pillows. None but the sick went shod. An
Oxford Friar found a pair of shoes one morning, and wore them at
matins. At night he dreamed that robbers leapt on him in a dangerous
pass between Gloucester and Oxford with, shouts of "Kill, kill!" "I am
a friar,"