RIVALRY BETWEEN THE ORDERS: ATTACKS ON THE FRIARS.

It was inevitable that a spirit of rivalry should exist between the two great Mendicant Orders; and the rivalry soon developed into antagonism. In the thirteenth century one lecturer to the Friars Minors at Oxford was removed from the convent, another was suspended from lecturing, for causing offence to the Friars Preachers and at their request[489]. An ‘enormous scandal of discord,’ in Matthew Paris’ words[490], arose in the year 1243, each of the two Orders claiming precedence of the other. Though there is little direct evidence on the point, there is no doubt that Oxford was one of the chief scenes of conflict. The controversy was carried on by ‘men of education and scholars[491],’ and some details of it are preserved in the pages of Eccleston. It arose from the proselytising tendencies of the two Orders[492]. The Dominicans, according to Eccleston[493],

Friar Albert of Pisa, when Provincial Minister of England, obtained a bull from Gregory IX prohibiting this practice:

The Dominicans on their side claimed similar privileges, and obtained a bull from Innocent IV to the effect that

Eccleston complains that the Dominicans made such good use of the bull that ‘they let scarcely any one go;’ and regards this equitable arrangement as a great hardship to his Order. ‘But not long,’ he adds, ‘did this tribulation last;’ Friars William of Nottingham and Peter of Tewkesbury obtained from Innocent IV a revocation of his constitution[496].

The antagonism between the two Orders did not stop here, and in many of the great questions of the day they are found on opposite sides. The Oxford Franciscans, as we have already seen, were among the staunchest supporters of Simon de Montfort; the Oxford Dominicans seem to have sided with the King. The famous Mad Parliament, which Henry III summoned to Oxford in 1258, met in the convent of the Black Friars, and Prince Edward and his retainers stayed there before the battle of Lewes[497].

The same rivalry made itself felt in the sphere of philosophy, and the Franciscans dealt a heavy blow at their more orthodox adversaries by impugning successfully an important doctrine of Thomas Aquinas[498]. The Angelic Doctor had held with Aristotle and against Averroes that the individualising principle was not form but matter. How then, asked his opponents, could the individual exist in the non-material world[499]? Such a doctrine was in contradiction to the mediaeval theory of heaven and the life after death; and the Church rallied to the side of the Franciscans. At Oxford, Archbishop Kilwardby, Dominican though he was, condemned this among many other errors in 1276, but the sentence seems to have had little effect at the time[500]. It was chiefly against this opinion that Peckham’s measures in 1284 were directed[501]. If the Dominicans had allowed the aspersion cast on their greatest teacher to pass without serious protest when the condemnation came from one of themselves, they were anything but content to submit to the adverse judgment of one of their rivals. Peckham was attacked both by the Provincial of the Black Friars in a congregation at Oxford[502] and in an anonymous pamphlet apparently by a Cambridge Dominican[503]—‘a cursed page and infamous leaf,’ as he describes it, ‘whose beginning is headless, whose middle malignant, and whose end foolish and formless.’ His action further involved the whole of the Franciscan Order in England in the storm. He was accused of ‘having sown discord between the Orders[504];’ and to defend himself against the charge of unduly favouring the Franciscans, he denied that he had consulted the latter on the subject and insisted on the previous condemnation of the same error by his predecessor[505]. He claimed to be actuated by no personal animus against the dead, whom he held in high honour and whom he had himself defended; his attack was directed against ignorant and arrogant men who presumed to teach what they did not know and to entice youths to the same errors. ‘We cannot and dare not,’ he urged, ‘fail to rescue our children, as far as we can, from the traps of error;’ and he forbade ‘curious theologians’ to defend the condemned doctrines in ‘the disputes of boys’ (in certaminibus puerilibus) at Oxford.

The question became a matter rather of feeling than of argument; the esprit de corps of the rival factions was involved, and the two Orders further estranged[506].

Peckham lost few opportunities of advancing the interests of the Mendicants at the expense of the monks and secular clergy, and of his brother Franciscans against the other Orders. The discipline and morals of the nuns of Godstow had suffered owing to the proximity of their house to the university-town, and the Archbishop, in his injunctions for the better government of the same, appointed two Friars Preachers and two Friars Minors (or four of each if necessary) as permanent confessors to the Convent[507]. In 1291 he wrote to the Prior of St. Frideswide’s urging him to confer the church of St. Peter le Bailey on some one devoted to the Friars Minors and nominated by them[508]. While strenuously asserting the right of the Minorites to hear confessions in spite of the opposition of the parish priests[509], he forbade the Carmelites and Austin Friars at Oxford to hear any confessions of any persons whatsoever, regular or secular, clerk or lay, male or female, and ordered the Archdeacon, if they disobeyed, to pronounce public sentence of excommunication on them[510]. Arguing that ‘it was lawful to change a vow for a better one[511],’ he maintained that the Franciscans might, as they had hitherto done, admit members of other religious bodies to their Order; he would, he wrote to the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, himself admit them, if he were still Provincial Minister.

Peckham further, while condemning the erroneous opinions of the Dominicans at Oxford, denied the claim to superiority which they put forward[513]. The Franciscans claimed precedence on the ground of their humility (which of course dwindled in inverse ratio as their assertion of it grew), and of their absolute poverty. The Archbishop enunciated the formula which was condemned by the inquisitors and the Pope in the next century, and which formed, so to speak, the text of the controversy, ‘De paupertate Christi.’ He defined the poverty of the apostles to be

the Minorites in following this example were in a state of ‘perfection,’ and lived a holier life than any other Order in the Church.

The claim was generally admitted, and led to the exaltation of the Minorites in the eyes of the world at the expense of the other Orders[515]. As early as 1269 a controversy on this point arose between the convents of the two Orders at Oxford. A Dominican named Solomon of Ingeham accused the Minorites of receiving money either with their own hands or through a third party[516]. The Franciscans denied the charge and demanded the punishment of Friar Solomon. The Dominicans asked them to prove the falsehood of Solomon’s assertion and promised then to punish him. ‘The burden of proof,’ replied the Franciscans, ‘lies with you who affirm, not with us who deny.’ The Dominicans brought forward many instances in which they maintained that the Minorites had actually received money. These, answered the latter, were merely personal transgressions, and affected the community no more than any case of carnal sin or disobedience. The Dominicans, however, based their contention mainly on the argument that money bequeathed to the Franciscans must be received either by them in person or by intermediaries on their behalf. The Minorites answered

Peace was eventually restored by the interposition of the Chancellor and leading secular masters, at whose recommendation Friar Solomon withdrew his words. It is curious that neither the document containing the account of this quarrel, nor Peckham, mention the explanation which afterwards became the accepted theory, that the ownership of the goods of the Franciscans was vested in the Pope. Yet this explanation was originally given by Innocent IV in 1245[517].

As far as the bulk of the Franciscan Order was concerned, the controversy on ‘Evangelical Poverty’ was purely a theoretical one[518], its ultimate importance rather accidental than real. The claim to ‘this perfitnesse,’ as Daw Topias contemptuously calls it, rested not on fact but on a legal construction. The friars had only the use, not the proprietorship, of their lands and houses and goods. John XXII by his bull, ‘Ad conditorem canonum,’ issued on the 8th of December, 1322, and declaring that use was inseparable from proprietorship, withdrew from the Order the right of holding property in the name of the Roman See, and thus went far to destroy its theoretical claim to precedence. The whole Order, instead of the party of the Spirituales merely, was for a time banded against the Pope; and the dispute about a legal quibble became transformed under the hands of Ockham into an examination of the position and claims of the Papacy, and of the whole relation of Church and State.

Ockham probably studied at Oxford in his younger days, but it was no doubt later in life, and under the influence of Marsilius of Padua, that he developed the doctrines which made him ‘at once the glory and the reproach of his Order[519].’ In philosophy he had many followers at Oxford in the fourteenth century, and the Franciscan Convent was, like the rest of the University, divided on the questions of Nominalism and Realism[520]. The dispute concerning the poverty of Christ was not allowed to rest. It was this discussion which first brought the Archbishop of Armagh into open hostility to the friars[521]; and Wiclif mentions the controversy as being still carried on between the two Orders in his time.

A great historian has said of the Middle Ages, that ‘at no time in the world’s history has theory, pretending all the while to control practice, been so utterly divorced from it[523].’ An extract from the Patent Rolls[524] will afford a striking illustration of the truth of these words as far as the learned Franciscans, the professors of evangelical poverty, are concerned. The date is February 22nd, 1378; the writ is issued in the King’s name.

It was probably the glaring contrast between the lofty claims of the friars and their actual life, rather than any inferiority in their morality as compared with the secular priests, which exposed them to the bitterest denunciations and taunts of the reformers. The Mendicants were far more in sympathy with the poor than were the endowed monks, and possessed far more than the parish priests the confidence of the people[525]. Wiclif recognised this fact, while he lamented it.

The first important attack on the friars in the fourteenth century was that led by Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh. He had been Fellow of Balliol College before 1325 and Chancellor of the University in 1333[527]. While assailing the whole principle of mendicancy, his main charge against the friars, especially the friars at Oxford, was that of ‘stealing’ children, i.e. of secretly inducing them to enter the Mendicant Orders. In 1357 the Archbishop was cited to appear and defend himself before the Papal Court at Avignon; and on the 8th of November, in a solemn assembly of Pope and Cardinals, he made a great speech in defence of the parish priests against the Mendicants[528]. The Archbishop stated that, owing to the privileges of hearing confessions which the friars enjoyed, almost all youths in the Universities, and in the houses of their parents (in nearly all of which friars were to be found as ‘familiares’), had Mendicants as their confessors.

Parents were in consequence afraid to send their sons to the Universities, and preferred to keep them at home as tillers of the soil. While the numbers both of the friaries and of their inmates had enormously increased, the number of secular students in every faculty decreased; the students at Oxford, who in his time were reckoned at 30,000, had now sunk to 6000.

Though these figures are of course preposterously exaggerated, and though the main cause of the diminution of the number of students was the Black Death, there can be no doubt of the essential truth of the accusation. In 1358 the University of Oxford passed a statute forbidding the admission of boys under eighteen to the Orders. The statute deserves to be quoted at length[530].

The friars did not deny the charge, but defended their conduct[531], and exerted themselves to the utmost to obtain a repeal of the statute. Their efforts were successful. While a suit which they had begun in the Roman Court was yet undecided, the Provincials of the four Orders laid their grievances before the King in Parliament[532]. In 1366 the obnoxious statute was formally annulled, on condition that the friars’ suits at Rome and elsewhere against the University should cease[533]. The latter, however, did not abandon the struggle; its influence is probably to be seen in the petition of the Commons in 1402[534], that no one be allowed to enter any of the four Orders under the age of twenty-one years. The King’s answer was not favourable: he ordained merely that no friar should admit to his Order an infant under fourteen years without the assent of his father, mother, or guardians. The ordinance applied to the whole of England, and the petition of the Commons is a sign that the popularity of the friars had suffered under the attacks of Wiclif.

It has been clearly shown by recent criticism[535] that Wiclif’s enmity to the friars was confined to the last few years of his life. His earlier opponents were the monks—the religiosi possessionati. At one time he compares the poverty and mendicancy of St. Francis with the manual labour of St. Peter and St. Paul, in contrast with the possessions and worldly honours of the ecclesiastics of his time[536]. He seems to have been on terms of some intimacy with William Woodford, who may be regarded as the leader of the Oxford Minorites in their subsequent controversy with the reformer and his followers. Woodford relates[537] that

Wiclif had indeed many points of sympathy, especially on questions of ecclesiastical polity, with the Friars Minors. He was in agreement with them and in antagonism to the monks and many of the bishops, in the opinion that the tribute to the Pope should be refused, and that the secular power was, under some circumstances, justified in depriving the Church of its possessions[539]. Eight or nine years before Wiclif wrote his famous tract in defence of the Parliament of 1366, an Oxford friar and doctor declared in his school that the King had the right of depriving ecclesiastics of their temporalities; he was ordered by Congregation to recant this and other opinions solemnly after a University sermon, and to pay 100s. to the University[540].

When, however, Wiclif began to call in question the Church’s doctrine on the Eucharist, he found himself in direct antagonism to the friars; and the quarrel, which began in a dogmatic difference in the schools[541], soon acquired a wider character. Wiclif’s accusations resolve themselves really into three[542]; firstly, that the friars upheld the ‘idolatrous’ doctrine of the Eucharist; secondly, that they maintained the theory of the mendicancy of Christ; thirdly, that they taught the people to rely for their salvation on letters of fraternity and prayers and masses, instead of on a good life; whence a general demoralization ensued.

It is improbable, however, that the indulgences granted by the friars differed from the other indulgences of the Middle Ages, which in theory absolved from the temporal punishment, not from the sin and eternal punishment. Wiclif may have classed with the friars the ‘pardoners’ who did not belong to any of the four Orders[544]. The records relating to the Franciscan house at Oxford throw no light on the matter, which indeed belongs to the general history of the Mendicants, not to the history of a particular convent. Wiclif’s charges amount practically to this: the friars were the foremost champions of the external, unspiritual form of religion, which he laboured to destroy: they were no longer leaders of thought, but obstacles to progress.

Though Wiclif’s writings, especially his English writings, are full of violent invective against the friars[545], it is difficult to find in them any definite accusations of the grosser forms of immorality. One instance will sufficiently illustrate the difference between Wiclif and his followers.

‘Jack Upland’ improves on this, and does not scruple to impute to the friars generally the vilest sins.

‘Your freres ben taken alle day
with wymmen and wifes,
bot of your privey sodomye
spake I not yette[547].’

At Oxford the seculars, always numerically strong and jealous of the regulars, rallied to Wiclif’s standard; while the Mendicants roused the anger of the University by appealing to external authority. The friars were accused of having made use of their position as confessors to stir up the peasant revolt. On the 18th of February, 1382, the heads of the four Mendicant Convents at Oxford sent a letter to John of Gaunt, denying the charge and begging his protection[548]; all evils were attributed to them, and their lives were in danger. Their chief enemy was Nicholas Hereford. In Lent of the same year Hereford preached a University sermon at St. Mary’s, in which he argued that no ‘religious’ should be admitted to any degree at Oxford[549]. He was appointed by the Chancellor to deliver the principal English sermon of the year at St. Frideswide’s Cross on Ascension Day (May 15th), and used the opportunity to attack monks and friars and mendicancy in general[550]. On the 19th of the same month, the ‘Council of the Earthquake’ met at the Blackfriars in London, and condemned ten of Wiclif’s conclusions as heretical and fourteen as erroneous; among the seventeen doctors of divinity who took part in the council were four Minorites, the Oxford Franciscans being represented by Hugo Karlelle and Thomas Bernewell[551]. The Archbishop sent Peter Stokes, a Carmelite, to publish the condemnation at Oxford. The Chancellor and Proctors resented this interference with their rights, and the general feeling was strong in Wiclif’s favour. Stokes and his brethren went in fear of their lives; when the Carmelite ‘determined’ against Philip Repyngdon on the 10th of June, men were seen in the schools with arms concealed under their clothes. At length, on June 15th, the Chancellor was compelled, by the King’s command, to publish the condemnation of the twenty-four conclusions;

In November the University tried to turn the tables on its adversaries; in an assembly of the clerks at St. Frideswide’s, the Chancellor accused some of the orthodox party (among them a Minorite friar) of heresy[553]. But from this time the sacramental controversy tended to retire into the background, and the alliance of monks and friars, which Wiclif’s attack on the faith had called into being[554], came to an end. In 1392, Henry Crompe, a Cistercian monk, who had been a prominent opponent of Wiclif, was charged with having determined on several occasions against the right of the friars to hear confessions[555]. Friar John Tyssyngton and other Minorites took part in his condemnation in a Convocation held in the house of the Carmelites at Stamford. In their anxiety to silence their adversaries, the Mendicant Orders proved false to the tradition common to all the great mediaeval Universities—the tradition of intellectual freedom; they upheld the claim of Archbishop Arundel to visit the University, and lent their support to the rigid censorship which he established[556]. But it is only fair to remember that, years before this, the authority of the Church had been invoked against the teaching of the friars themselves. In 1368 Simon Langham sent thirty errors of the friars to the University, and it was enacted that no one should presume to defend or approve these tenets in the schools or elsewhere ‘on pain of the greater excommunication[557].’

The history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries affords many other illustrations of the hostility with which the friars, and especially the Minorites, were regarded by the University. The subject of academical degrees, and of the action taken by the University against the ‘wax-doctors,’ has been treated elsewhere. A statute, which probably dates from the first half of the fifteenth century, provides that both the collatores of University sermons shall, if possible, be seculars[558]. Wood says that in the years 1423 and 1424 there

The chief offender, Friar William Russell, warden of the Greyfriars of London, taught that tithes might be given arbitrarily, i.e. not to the parson legally entitled to them, but ‘for the pious use of the poor,’ according to the will of the giver. The University of Oxford condemned this doctrine and ordained that everyone taking a degree should formally abjure it: the oath, which remained in force till 1564, runs thus:—

Insuper, tu jurabis quod nullas conclusiones per fratrem Wilhelmum Russell, ordinis Minorum, nuper positas et praedicatas, contra decimas personales, et in nostra Universitate Oxoniae, necnon in venerabili concilio episcoporum, anno Domini millesimo quadringentesimo vicesimo quinto celebrato Londoniis, solemniter damnatas, nec alicujus earum sententiam tenebis, docebis, vel defendes efficaciter publice aut occulte, nec aliquem doctorem, tentorem vel defensorem hujusmodi, ope, consilio vel favore juvabis[559].