saintly man, who had recently become Archbishop of Canterbury,
protested against his misdeeds. All England was behind the Archbishop,
and Henry was compelled to dismiss Peter and then to welcome back
Peter's enemies and to restore them to their rights. It was of no
slight importance that a man so devoted and unselfish as Edmund Rich
had put himself at the head of the movement. It was a good thing, no
doubt, to maintain that wealth should be in the hands rather of
natives than of foreigners; but after all every contention for
material wealth alone is of the earth, earthy. No object which appeals
exclusively to the selfish instincts can, in the long run, be worth
contending for. Edmund Rich's accession to the national cause was a
guarantee that the claims of righteousness and mercy in the management
of the national government would not altogether be forgotten, and
fortunately there were new forces actively at work in the same
direction. The friars, the followers of St. Francis and St. Dominic,
had made good their footing in England.

5. =Francis of Assisi.=--Francis, the son of a merchant in the Tuscan
town of Assisi, threw aside the vanities of youth after a serious
illness. He was wedded, he declared, to Poverty as his bride. He
clothed himself in rags. When his father sent him with a horseload of
goods to a neighbouring market, he sold both horse and goods, and
offered the money to build a church. His father was enraged, and
summoned him before the bishop that he might be deprived of the right
of inheriting that which he knew not how to use. Francis stripped
himself naked, renouncing even his clothes as his father's property.
"I have now," he said, "but one Father, He that is in heaven." He
wandered about as a beggar, subsisting on alms and devoting himself to
the care of the sick and afflicted. In his heroism of self-denial he
chose out the lepers, covered as they were with foul and infectious
sores, as the main objects of his tending. Before long he gathered
together a brotherhood of men like-minded with himself, who left all,
to give not alms but themselves to the help of the poor and sorrowful
of Christ's flock. In =1209= Innocent III. constituted them into a new
order, not of monks but of Friars (_Fratres_ or brethren). The special
title of the new order, which after ages have known by the name of
Franciscans, was that of Minorites (_Fratres Minores_), or the lesser
brethren, because Francis in his humility declar