ful 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," shrieked the
terror-stricken brother. "You lie," was the instant answer, "for you go
shod." The Friar lifted up his foot in disproof, but the shoe was there. In
an agony of repentance he woke and flung the pair out of window.