of a
revolutionary temper.

The anti-papal laws of the fourteenth century were the acts of the
secular not of the ecclesiastical power. They were not simply
anti-papal, they were also anti-clerical in their tendency, since to the
men of the age an attack on the pope was an attack on the Church. No
doubt the English bishop at Edward's court sympathised with his master's
dislike of foreign ecclesiastical interference, and the English priest
was glad to be relieved from payments to the curia. But the clergyman,
whose soul grew indignant against the curialists, still believed that
the pope was the divinely appointed autocrat of the Church universal.
Being a man, a pope might be a bad pope; but the faithful Christian,
though he might lament and protest, could not but obey in the last
resort. The papacy was so essentially interwoven with the whole Church
of the Middle Ages, that few figments have less historical basis than
the notion that there was an anti-papal Anglican Church in the days of
the Edwards. However, before another generation had passed away,
ecclesiastical protests began.

Monasticism no less than the papacy was of the very essence of the
Church of the Middle Ages. Yet the monastic ideal had no longer the
force that it had in previous generations, and even the latest
embodiments of the religious life had declined from their original
popularity. Pope John XXII. himself, in his warfare against William of
Ockham and the Spiritual Franciscans who had supported Louis of Bavaria,
denied in good round terms the Franciscan doctrine of "evangelical
poverty". Ockham was now dead, and with him perished the last of the
great cosmopolitan schoolmen, of whose birth indeed England might boast,
but who early forsook Oxford for Paris. Conspicuous among the younger
academical generation was Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh, whose
bitter attacks on the fundamental principles underlying the mendicant
theory of the regular life are indicative of the changing temper of the
age. A distinguished Oxford scholar, a learned and pungent writer, a
popular preacher, a reputed saint, and a good friend of the pope,
Fitzralph made himself, about 1357, the champion of the secular clergy
against the friars by writing a treatise to prove that absolute poverty
was neither practised nor commended by the apostles.[1] The indignant
mendicants procured the archbishop's citation to Avignon, and it was a
striking proof of the ineffectiveness o