of their
number at Canterbury, four of the Franciscans went on to London, and
thence a little later two of them set out for Oxford. Alike at London
and at Oxford, they found a cordial welcome from the Dominicans, eating
in their refectories, and sleeping in their dormitories, until they
were able to erect modest quarters in both places. The brethren of the
new order excited unbounded enthusiasm. Necessity and choice combined
to compel them to interpret their vow of poverty as St. Francis would
have wished. They laboured with their own hands at the construction of
their humble churches. The friars at Oxford knew the pangs of debt and
hunger, rejected pillows as a vain luxury, and limited the use of boots
and shoes to the sick and infirm. The faithful saw the brethren singing
songs as they picked their way over the frozen mud or hard snow, blood
marking the track of their naked feet, without their being conscious of
it. The joyous radiance of Francis himself illuminated the lives of his
followers. "The friars," writes their chronicler, "were so full of fun
among themselves that a deaf mute could hardly refrain from laughter at
seeing them." With the same glad spirit they laboured for the salvation
of souls, the cure of sickness, and the relief of distress. The
emotional feeling of the age quickly responded to their zeal. Within a
few years other houses had arisen at Gloucester, at Nottingham, at
Stamford, at Worcester, at Northampton, at Cambridge, at Lincoln, at
Shrewsbury. In a generation there was hardly a town of importance in
England that had not its Franciscan convent, and over against it a
rival Dominican house.

The esteem felt for the followers of Francis and Dominic led to an
extraordinary extension of the mendicant type. New orders of friars
arose, preserving the essential attribute of absolute poverty, though
differing from each other and from the two prototypes in various
particulars. Some of these lesser orders found their way to England. In
the same year as Agnellus, there came to England the Trinitarian
friars, called also the Maturins, from the situation of their first
house in Paris, an order whose special function was the redemption of
captives. In 1240 returning crusaders brought back with them the first
Carmelite friars, for whom safer quarters had to be found than in their
original abodes in Syria. This society spread widely, and in 1287, to
the disgust of the older monks, it laid aside the party-col