er played a more than secondary part in this country, to
whose soil the delicate machinery of the Inquisition, of which they
were by choice the managers, was never congenial. Of far greater
importance for the population of England at large was the Order of the
Franciscans or (as they were here wont to call themselves or to be
called) Minorites or Grey Friars. To them the poor had habitually
looked for domestic ministrations, and for the inspiring and consoling
eloquence of the pulpit; and they had carried their labours into the
midst of the suffering population, not afraid of association with that
poverty which they were by their vow themselves bound to espouse, or of
contact with the horrors of leprosy and the plague. Departing from the
short-sighted policy of their illustrious founder, they had become a
learned, as well as a ministering and preaching Order; and it was
precisely from among them that, at Oxford and elsewhere, sprang a
succession of learned monks, whose names are inseparably connected with
some of the earliest English growths of philosophical speculation and
scientific research. Nor is it possible to doubt that in the middle of
the thirteenth century the monks of this Order at Oxford had exercised
an appreciable influence upon the beginnings of a political struggle of
unequalled importance for the progress of our constitutional life. But
in the Franciscans also the fourteenth century witnessed a change,
which may be described as a gradual loss of the qualities for which
they had been honourably distinguished; and in England, as elsewhere,
the spirit of the words which Dante puts into the mouth of St. Francis
of Assisi was being verified by his degenerate Children:--

So soft is flesh of mortals, that on earth
A good beginning doth no longer last
Than while an oak may bring its fruit to birth.

Outwardly, indeed, the Grey Friars might still often seem what their
predecessors had been, and might thus retain a powerful influence over
the unthinking crowd, and to sheer worldlings appear as heretofore to
represent a troublesome memento of unexciting religious obligations;
"Preach not," says Chaucer's "Host,"

"as friars do in Lent,
That they for our old sins may make us weep,
Nor in such wise thy tale make us to sleep."

But in general men were beginning to suspect the motives as well as to
deride the practices of the Friars, to accuse them of lying against St.
Francis, and to desidera