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THE COMING OF THE FRIARS AND OTHER HISTORIC ESSAYS
BY THE REV. AUGUSTUS JESSOPP, D.D.
Hon. Canon in Norwich Cathedral, Hon. Fellow of Worcester College,
Oxford, and Hon. Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge
FOURTEENTH IMPRESSION
TO MY FRIEND AND SOMETIME TUTOR,
FRANCIS WHALLEY HARPER,
CANON OF YORK,
I OFFER THIS VOLUME AS A TOKEN OF MY GRATITUDE
[These Essays have appeared at various times in "The Nineteenth
Century," and are now printed with some alterations, corrections, and
additions.]
CONTENTS.
I. THE COMING OF THE FRIARS
II. VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK SIX HUNDRED YEARS AGO
III. DAILY LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL MONASTERY
IV. THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA
V. THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA (_continued_)
VI. THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY
VII. THE PROPHET OF WALNUT-TREE YARD
I.
THE COMING OF THE FRIARS.
Sweet St. Francis of Assisi, would that he were here again!--_Lord
Tennyson._
When King Richard of England, whom men call the Lion-hearted, was
wasting his time at Messina, after his boisterous fashion, in the
winter of 1190, he heard of the fame of Abbot Joachim, and sent for
that renowned personage, that he might hear from his own lips the words
of prophecy and their interpretation.
Around the personality of Joachim there has gathered no small amount of
_mythus._ He was, it appears, the inventor of that mystical method of
Hermeneutics which has in our time received the name of "the year-day
theory," and which, though now abandoned for the most part by sane men,
has still some devout and superstitious advocates in the school of Dr.
Cumming and kindred visionaries.
Abbot Joachim proclaimed that a stupendous catastrophe was at hand.
Opening the Book of the Revelation of St. John he read, pondered, and
interpreted. A divine illumination opened out to him the dark things
that were written in the sacred pages. The unenlightened could make
nothing of "a time, times, and half a time" [Footnote: Dan. xii. 7.];
to them the terrors of the 1,260 days [Footnote: Rev. xi 3.] were an
insoluble enigma long since given up as hopeless, whose answer would
come only at the Day of Judgment. Abbot Joachim declared that the key
to the mystery had been to him revealed. What could "a time, times, and
half a time" mean, but three years and a half? What could a year mean
in the divine economy but the _lunar_ year of 360 days? for was not the
moon the symbol of the Church of God? What were those 1,260 days but
the sum of the days of three years and a half? Moreover, as it had been
with the prophet Ezekiel, to whom it was said, "I have appointed thee a
day for a year," so it must needs be with other seers who saw the
visions of God. To them the "day" was not as our brief prosaic day--to
them too had been "appointed a day for a year." The "time, times, and
half a time" were the 1,260 days, and these were 1,260 years, and the
stupendous catastrophe, the battle of Armageddon, the reign of
Antichrist, the new heavens and the new earth, the slaughter and the
resurrection of the two heavenly witnesses, were at hand. Eleven
hundred and ninety years had passed away of those 1,260. "Hear, O
heavens, and give ear, O earth," said Joachim; "Antichrist is already
born, yea born in the city of Rome!"
Though King Richard, in the strange interview of which contemporary
historians have left us a curious narrative, exhibited much more of the
spirit of the scoffer than of the convert, and evidently had no faith
in Abbott Joachim's theories and his mission, it was otherwise with the
world at large. At the close of the twelfth century a very general
belief, the result of a true instinct, pervaded all classes that
European society was passing through a tremendous crisis, that the dawn
of a new era, or, as they phrased it, "the end of all things" was at
hand.
The Abbot Joachim was only the spokesman of his age who was lucky
enough to get a hearing. He spoke a language that was a jargon of
rhapsody, but he spoke vaguely of terrors, and perils, and earthquakes,
and thunderings, the day of wrath; and because he spoke so darkly men
listened all the more eagerly, for there was a vague anticipation of
the breaking up of the great waters, and that things that had been
heretofore could not continue as they were.
Verily when the thirteenth century opened, the times were evil, and no
hope seemed anywhere on the horizon. The grasp of the infidel was
tightened upon the Holy City, and what little force there ever had been
among the rabble of Crusaders was gone now; the truculent ruffianism
that pretended to be animated by the crusading spirit showed its real
character in the hideous atrocities for which Simon de Montfort is
answerable, and in the unparalleled enormities of the sack of
Constantinople in 1204. For ten years (1198--1208) through the length
and breadth of Germany there was ceaseless and sanguinary conflict. In
the great Italian towns party warfare, never hesitating to resort to
every kind of crime, had long been chronic. The history of Sicily is
one long record of cruelty, tyranny, and wrong--committed, suffered, or
revenged. Over the whole continent of Europe people seem to have had no
_homes;_ the merchant, the student, the soldier, the ecclesiastic were
always on the move. Young men made no difficulty in crossing the Alps
to attend lectures at Bologna, or crossing the Channel to or from
Oxford and Paris. The soldier or the scholar was equally a free-lance,
ready to take service whereever it offered, and to settle wherever
there was dread to win or money to save. No one trusted in the
stability of anything. [Footnote: M. Jusserand's beautiful book, "La
Vie Nomade," was not published till 1884, _i.e.,_ a year after this
essay appeared.]
To a thoughtful man watching the signs of the times, it may well have
seemed that the hope for the future of civilization--the hope for any
future, whether of art, science, or religion-lay in the steady growth
of the towns. It might be that the barrier of the Alps would always
limit the influence of Italian cities to Italy and the islands of the
Mediterranean; but for the great towns of what is now Belgium and
Germany what part might not be left for them to play in the history of
the world? In England the towns were as yet insignificant communities
compared with such mighty aggregates of population as were to be found
in Bruges, Antwerp, or Cologne; but even the English towns _were_
communities, and they were beginning to assert themselves somewhat
loudly while clinging to their chartered rights with jealous tenacity.
Those rights, however, were eminently exclusive and selfish in their
character. The chartered towns were ruled in all cases by an oligarchy.
[Footnote: Stubbs, "Constitutional History," vol. i. Section 131.] The
increase in the population brought wealth to a class, the class of
privileged traders, associated into guilds, who kept their several
_mysteries_ to themselves by vigilant measures of protection. Outside
the well-guarded defences which these trades-unions constructed, there
were the masses--hewers of wood and drawers of water--standing to the
skilled artizan of the thirteenth century almost precisely in the same
relation as the bricklayer's labourer does to the mason in our own
time. The _sediment_ of the town population in the Middle Ages was a
dense slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease,
and dull despair, such as the worst slums of London, Paris, or
Liverpool know nothing of. When we hear of the mortality among the
townsmen during the periodical outbreaks of pestilence or famine,
horror suggests that we should dismiss as incredible such stories as
the imagination shrinks from dwelling on. What greatly added to the
dreary wretchedness of the lower order in the towns was the fact that
the ever-increasing throngs of beggars, outlaws, and ruffian runaways
were simply left to shift for themselves. The civil authorities took no
account of them as long as they quietly rotted and died; and, what was
still more dreadful, the whole machinery of the Church polity had been
formed and was adapted to deal with entirely different conditions of
society from those which had now arisen.
The idea of the parish priest taking the oversight of his flock, and
ministering to each member as the shepherd of the people, is a grand
one, but it is an idea which can be realized, and then only
approximately, in the village community. In the towns of the Middle
Ages the parochial system, except as a _civil_ institution, had broken
down.
The other idea, of men and women weary of the hard struggle with sin,
and fleeing from the wrath to come, joining together to give themselves
up to the higher life, out of the reach of temptation and safe from the
witcheries of Mammon,--that too was a grand idea, and not unfrequently
it had been carried out grandly. But the monk was nothing and did
nothing for the townsman; he fled away to his solitude; the rapture of
silent adoration was his joy and exceeding great reward; his nights and
days might be spent in praise and prayer, sometimes in study and
research, sometimes in battling with the powers of darkness and
ignorance, sometimes in throwing himself heart and soul into art which
it was easy to persuade himself he was doing only for the glory of God;
but all this must go on far away from the busy haunts of men, certainly
not within earshot of the multitude. Moreover the monk was, by birth,
education, and sympathy, one with the upper classes. What were the
rabble to him? [Footnote: The 20th Article of the Assize of Clarendon
is very significant: "Prohibet dominus rex ne monachi... recipiant
_aliquem de minuto populo in monachum,_ vel canonicum vel fratrem,"
&c.--Stubbs, "Benedict Abbas," pref. p. cliv.] In return the townsmen
hated him cordially, as a supercilious aristocrat and Pharisee, with
the guile and greed of the Scribe and lawyer superadded.
Upon the townsmen--whatever it may have been among the countrymen--the
ministers of religion exercised the smallest possible _restraint._ Nay!
it was only too evident that the bonds of ecclesiastical discipline
which had so often exercised a salutary check upon the unruly had
become seriously relaxed of late, both in town and country; they had
been put to too great a strain and had snapped. By the suicidal methods
of Excommunication and Interdict all ranks were schooled into doing
without the rites of religion, the baptism of their children, or the
blessing upon the marriage union. In the meantime it was notorious that
even in high places there were instances not a few of Christians who
had denied the faith and had given themselves up to strange beliefs, of
which the creed of the Moslem was not the worst. Men must have received
with a smile the doctrine that Marriage was a Sacrament when everybody
knew that, among the upper classes at least, the bonds of matrimony
were soluble almost at pleasure. [Footnote: Eleanor of Aquitaine,
consort of Henry II., had been divorced by Louis VII. of France.
Constance of Brittany, mother of Arthur--Shakespeare's idealized
Constance--left her husband, Ranulph, Earl of Chester, to unite herself
with Guy of Flanders. Conrad of Montferat divorced the daughter of
Isaac Angelus, Emperor of Constantinople, to marry Isabella, daughter
of Amalric, King of Jerusalem, the bride repudiating her husband
Henfrid of Thouars. Philip II. of France married the sister of the King
of Denmark one day and divorced her the next; then married a German
lady, left her, and returned to the repudiated Dane. King John in 1189
divorced Hawisia, Countess of Gloucester, and took Isabella of
Angouleme to wife, but how little he cared to be faithful to the one or
the other the chronicles disdain to ask.] It seems hardly worth while
to notice that the observance of Sunday was almost universally
neglected, or that sermons had become so rare that when Eustace, Abbot
of Flai, preached in various places in England in 1200, miracles were
said to have ensued as the ordinary effects of his eloquence.
Earnestness in such an age seemed in itself miraculous. Here and there
men and women, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, raised
their sobbing prayer to heaven that the Lord would shortly accomplish
the number of his elect and hasten his coming, and Abbot Joachim's
dreams were talked of and his vague mutterings made the sanguine hope
for better days. Among those mutterings had there not been a speech of
the two heavenly witnesses who were to do--ah! what were they not to
do? And these heavenly witnesses, who were they? When and where would
they appear?
Eight years before King Richard was in Sicily a child had been born in
the thriving town of Assisi, thirteen miles from Perugia, who was
destined to be one of the great movers of the world. Giovanni
Bernardone was the son of a wealthy merchant at Assisi, and from all
that appears an only child. He was from infancy intended for a
mercantile career, nor does he seem to have felt any dislike to it. One
story--and it is as probable as the other--accounts for his name
Francesco by assuring us that he earned it by his unusual familiarity
with the French language, acquired during his residence in France while
managing his father's business. The new name clung to him; the old
baptismal name was dropped; posterity has almost forgotten that it was
ever imposed. From the mass of tradition and personal recollections
that have come down to us from so many different sources it is not
always easy to decide when we are dealing with pure invention of pious
fraud, and when with mere exaggeration of actual fact, but it scarcely
admits of doubt that the young merchant of Assisi was engaged in trade
and commerce till his twenty-fourth year, living in the main as others
live, but perhaps early conspicuous for aiming at a loftier ideal than
that of his everyday associates, and characterized by the devout and
ardent temperament essential to the religious reformer. It was in the
year 1206 that he became a changed man. He fell ill--he lay at Death's
door. From the languor and delirium he recovered but slowly--when he
did recover old things had passed away; behold! all things had become
new. From this time Giovanni Bernardone passes out of sight, and from
the ashes of a dead past, from the seed which has withered that the new
life might germinate and fructify, Francis--why grudge to call him
Saint Francis?--of Assisi rises.
Very early the young man had shown a taste for Church restoration. The
material fabric of the houses of God in the land could not but exhibit
the decay of living faith; the churches were falling into ruins. The
little chapel of St. Mary and the Angels at Assisi was in a scandalous
condition of decay. It troubled the heart of the young pietist
profoundly to see the Christian church squalid and tottering to its
fall while within sight of it was the Roman temple in which men had
worshipped the idols. There it stood, as it had stood for a thousand
years--as it stands to this day. Oh, shame! that Christian men should
build so slightly while the heathen built so strongly!
To the little squalid ruin St. Francis came time and again, and poured
out his heart, perplexed and sad; and there, we are told, God met him
and a voice said, "Go, and build my church again." It was a "thought
beyond his thought," and with the straightforward simplicity of his
nature he accepted the message in its literal sense and at once set
about obeying it as he understood it.
He began by giving all he could lay his hands on to provide funds for
the work. His own resources exhausted, he applied for contributions to
all who came in his way. His father became alarmed at his son's
excessive liberality and the consequences that might ensue from his
strange recklessness; it is even said that he turned him out of doors;
it seems that the commercial partnership was cancelled: it is certain
that the son was compelled to make some great renunciation of wealth,
and that his private means were seriously restricted. That a man of
business should be blind to the preciousness of money was a sufficient
proof then, as now, that he must be mad.
O ye wary men of the world, bristling with the shrewdest of maxims,
bursting with the lessons of experience, ye of the cool heads and the
cold grey eyes, ye whom the statesman loves, and the tradesman trusts,
cautious, sagacious, prudent; when the rumbling of the earthquake tells
us that the foundations of the earth are out of course, we must look
for deliverance to other than you! A grain of enthusiasm is of mightier
force than a million tons of wisdom such as yours; then when the hour
of the great upheaval has arrived, and things can no longer be kept
going!
"Build up my church!" said the voice again to this gushing emaciated
fanatic in the second-rate Italian town, this dismal bankrupt of
twenty-four years of age, "of lamentably low extraction," whom no
University claimed as her own, and whom the learned pundits pitied. At
last he understood the profounder meaning of the words. It was no
temple made with hands, but the _living_ Church that needed raising.
The dust of corruption must be swept away, the dry bones be stirred;
the breath of the divine Spirit blow and reanimate them. Did not the
voice mean that? What remained but to obey?
In his journeyings through France it is hardly possible that St.
Francis should not have heard of _the poor men of Lyons_ whose peculiar
tenets at this time were arousing very general attention. It is not
improbable that he may have fallen in with one of those translations of
the New Testament into the vernacular executed by Stephen de Emsa at
the expense of Peter Waldo, and through his means widely circulated
among all classes. [Footnote: See "Facts and Documents Illustrative of
the History, Doctrine, and Rites, of the Ancient Albigenses and
Waldenses," by the Rev. S. R, Maitland, London, 8vo., 1832, p. 127 _et
seq._] Be it as it may, the words addressed by our Lord to the seventy,
when he sent them forth to preach the kingdom of heaven, seemed to St.
Francis to be written in letters of flame. They haunted him waking and
sleeping. "The lust of gain in the spirit of Cain!" what had it done
for the world or the Church but saturate the one and the other with
sordid greed? Mere wealth had not added to the sum of human happiness.
Nay, misery was growing; kings fought, and the people bled at every
pore. Merchants reared their palaces, and the masses were perishing.
Where riches increased, there pride and ungodliness were rampant. What
had corrupted the monks, whose lives should be so pure and exemplary?
What but their vast possessions, bringing with them luxury and the
paralysis of devotion and of all lofty endeavour? It was openly
maintained that the original Benedictine Rule could not be kept now as
of yore. One attempt after another to bring back the old monastic
discipline had failed deplorably. The Cluniac revival had been followed
by the Cluniac laxity, splendour, and ostentation. The Cistercians, who
for a generation had been the sour puritans of the cloister, had become
the most potent religious corporation in Europe; but theirs was the
power of the purse now. Where had the old strictness and the old
fervour gone? Each man was lusting for all that was not his own; but
free alms, where were they? and pity for the sad, and reverence for the
stricken, and tenderness and sympathy? "O gentle Jesus, where art Thou?
and is there no love of Thee anywhere, nor any love for Thy lost sheep,
Thou crucified Saviour of men?"
* * * * * * *
Knocking at his heart--not merely buzzing in his brain--the words kept
smiting him, "Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses,
neither scrip for your journey, neither two coats, nor yet staves, for
the workman is worthy of his meat!" Once men had changed the face of
the world with no other equipment. Faith then had removed mountains.
Why not again? He threw away his staff and shoes; he went forth with
literally a single garment; he was girt with a common rope round his
loins. He no more doubted of his mission, he no more feared for the
morrow than he feared for the young ravens that he loved and spake to
in an ecstasy of joy.
Henceforth there was "not a bird upon the tree but half forgave his
being human;" the flowers of the field looked out at him with special
greetings, the wolf of the mountains met him with no fierce glare in
his eye. Great men smiled at the craze of the monomaniac. Old men shook
their grey heads and remembered that they themselves had been young and
foolish. Practical men would not waste their words upon the folly of
the thing. Rich men, serenely confident of their position, affirmed
that they knew of only one who could overcome the world--to wit, the
veritable hero, he who holds the purse-strings. St. Francis did not
speak to these. "Oh, ye miserable, helpless, and despairing; ye who
find yourselves so unutterably forlorn--so very, very far astray; ye
lost souls whom Satan has bound through the long weary years; ye of the
broken hearts, bowed down and crushed; ye with your wasted bodies
loathsome to every sense, to whom life is torture and whom death will
not deliver; ye whose very nearness by the wayside makes the traveller
as he passes shudder with uncontrollable horror lest your breath should
light upon his garments, look! I am poor as you--I am one of
yourselves. Christ, the very Christ of God, has sent me with a message
to you. Listen!"
It is observable that we never hear of St. Francis that he was a
sermon-maker. He had received no clerical or even academical training.
Up to 1207 he had not even a license to preach. It was only after this
that he was--and apparently without desiring it--ordained a deacon. In
its first beginnings the Franciscan movement was essentially moral, not
theological, still less intellectual. The absence of anything like
dogma in the sermons of the early Minorites was their characteristic.
One is tempted to say it was a mere accident that these men were not
sectaries, so little in common had they with the ecclesiastics of the
time, so entirely did they live and labour among the laity of whom they
were and with whom they so profoundly sympathized.
The secret of the overwhelming, the irresistible attraction which St.
Francis exercised is to be found in his matchless simplicity, in his
sublime self-surrender. He removed mountains because he believed
intensely in the infinite power of _mere goodness_. While from the
writhing millions all over Europe--the millions ignorant, neglected,
plague-stricken, despairing--an inarticulate wail was going up to God,
St. Francis made it articulate. Then he boldly proclaimed: "God has
heard your cry! It meant this and that. I am sent to you with the good
God's answer." There was less than a step between accepting him as the
interpreter of their vague yearnings and embracing him as the
ambassador of Heaven to themselves.
St. Francis was hardly twenty-eight years old when he set out for Rome,
to lay himself at the feet of the great Pope Innocent the Third, and to
ask from him some formal recognition. The pontiff, so the story goes,
was walking in the garden of the Lateran when the momentous meeting
took place. Startled by the sudden apparition of an emaciated young
man, bareheaded, shoeless, half-clad, but--for all his gentleness--a
beggar who would take no denial, Innocent hesitated. It was but for a
brief hour, the next he was won.
Francis returned to Assisi with the Papal sanction for what was,
probably, a draught of his afterwards famous "Rule." He was met by the
whole city, who received him with a frenzy of excitement. By this time
his enthusiasm had kindled that of eleven other young men, all now
aglow with the same divine fire. A twelfth soon was added--he,
moreover, a layman of gentle blood and of knightly rank. All these had
surrendered their claim to everything in the shape of property, and had
resolved to follow their great leader's example by stripping themselves
of all worldly possessions, and suffering the loss of all things. They
were beggars--literally barefooted beggars. The love of money was the
root of all evil. They would not touch the accursed thing lest they
should be defiled--no, not with the tips of their fingers. "Ye cannot
serve God and Mammon."
Beggars they were, but they were brethren--_Fratres (Frères)_. We in
England have got to call them _Friars_. Francis was never known in his
lifetime as anything higher than _Brother Francis_, and his community
he insisted should be called the community of the lesser
brethren--_Fratres Minores_--for none could be or should be less than
they. Abbots and Priors, he would have none of them. "He that will be
chief among you," he said, in Christ's own words, "let him be your
servant." The highest official among the _Minorites_ was the
_Minister_, the elect of all, the servant of all, and if not humble
enough to serve, not fit to rule.
People talk of "Monks and Friars" as if these were convertible terms.
The truth is that the difference between the Monks and the Friars was
almost one of kind. The Monk was supposed never to leave his cloister.
The Friar in St. Francis' first intention had no cloister to leave.
Even when he had where to lay his head, his life-work was not to save
his own soul, but first and foremost to save the bodies and souls of
others. The Monk had nothing to do with ministering to others. At best
his business was to be the salt of the earth, and it behoved him to be
much more upon his guard that the salt should not lose his savour, than
that the earth should be sweetened. The Friar was an itinerant
evangelist, always on the move. He was a preacher of righteousness. He
lifted up his voice against sin and wrong. "Save yourselves from this
untoward generation!" he cried; "save yourselves from the wrath to
come." The Monk, as has been said, was an aristocrat. The Friar
belonged to the great unwashed!
Without the loss of a day the new apostles of poverty, of pity, of an
all-embracing love, went forth by two and two to build up the ruined
Church of God. Theology they were, from anything that appears,
sublimely ignorant of. Except that they were masters of every phrase
and word in the Gospels, their stock in trade was scarcely more than
that of an average candidate for Anglican orders; but to each and all
of them Christ was simply _everything_. If ever men have preached
Christ, these men did; Christ, nothing but Christ, the Alpha and the
Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. They had no
system, they had no views, they combated no opinions, they took no
side. Let the dialecticians dispute about this nice distinction or
that. There _could_ be no doubt that Christ had died and risen, and was
alive for evermore. There was no place for controversy or opinions when
here was a mere simple, indisputable, but most awful fact. Did you want
to wrangle about the aspect of the fact, the evidence, the what not?
St. Francis had no mission to argue with you. "The pearl of great
price--will you have it or not? Whether or not, there are millions
sighing for it, crying for it, dying for it. To the poor at any rate
the Gospel shall be preached now as of old."
To the poor by the poor. Those masses, those dreadful masses, crawling,
sweltering in the foul hovels, in many a southern town with never a
roof to cover them, huddling in groups under a dry arch, alive with
vermin; gibbering _cretins_ with the ghastly wens; lepers by the
hundred, too shocking for mothers to gaze at, and therefore driven
forth to curse and howl in the lazar-house outside the walls, there
stretching out their bony hands to clutch the frightened almsgiver's
dole, or, failing that, to pick up shreds of offal from the heaps of
garbage--to these St. Francis came.
More wonderful still!--to these outcasts came those other twelve, so
utterly had their leader's sublime self-surrender communicated itself
to his converts. "We are come," they said, "to live among you and be
your servants, and wash your sores, and make your lot less hard than it
is. We only want to do as Christ bids us do. We are beggars too, and we
too have not where to lay our heads. Christ sent us to you. Yes. Christ
the crucified, whose we are, and whose you are. Be not wroth with us,
we will help you if we can."
As they spoke, so they lived. They _were_ less than the least, as St.
Francis told them they must strive to be. Incredulous cynicism was put
to silence. It was wonderful, it was inexplicable, it was disgusting,
it was anything you please; but where there were outcasts, lepers,
pariahs, there, there were these penniless Minorites tending the
miserable sufferers with a cheerful look, and not seldom with a merry
laugh. As one reads the stories of those earlier Franciscans, one is
reminded every now and then of the extravagances of the Salvation Army.
The heroic example set by these men at first startled, and then
fascinated the upper classes. While labouring to save the lowest, they
took captive the highest. The Brotherhood grew in numbers day by day;
as it grew, new problems presented themselves. How to dispose of all
the wealth renounced, how to employ the energies of all the crowds of
brethren. Hardest of all, what to do with the earnest, highly-trained,
and sometimes erudite convert who could not divest himself of the
treasures of learning which he had amassed. "Must I part with my
books?" said the scholar, with a sinking heart. "Carry nothing with you
for your journey!" was the inexorable answer. "Not a Breviary? not even
the Psalms of David?" "Get them into your heart of hearts, and provide
yourself with a treasure in the heavens. Who ever heard of Christ
reading books save when He opened the book in the synagogue, and then
_closed_ it and went forth to teach the world for ever?"
In 1215 the new Order held its first Chapter at the Church of the
Portiuncula. The numbers of the Brotherhood and the area over which
their labours extended had increased so vastly that it was already
found necessary to nominate Provincial Ministers in France, Germany,
and Spain.
* * * * * * *
While these things were going on in Italy, another notable reformer was
vexing his righteous soul in Spain. St. Dominic was a very different
man from the gentle and romantic young Italian. Of high birth, which
among the haughty Castillians has always counted for a great deal, he
had passed his boyhood among ecclesiastics and academics. He was twelve
years older than St. Francis. He studied theology for ten years at the
University of Palencia, and before the twelfth century closed he was an
Augustinian Canon. In 1203, while St. Francis was still poring over his
father's ledgers, Dominic was associated with the Bishop of Osma in
negotiating a marriage for Alphonso the Eighth, king of Castille. For
the next ten years he was more or less concerned with the hideous
atrocities of the Albigensian war. During that dark period of his
career he was brought every day face to face with heresy and schism.
From infancy he must have heard those around him talk with a savage
intolerance of the Moors of the South and the stubborn Jews of Toledo
nearer home. Now his eyes were open to the perils that beset the Church
from sectaries who from within were for casting off her divine
authority. Wretches who questioned the very creeds and rejected the
Sacraments, yet perversely insisted that they were Christian men and
women, with a clearer insight into Gospel mysteries than Bishops and
Cardinals or the Holy Father himself. Here was heresy rampant, and
immortal souls, all astray, beguiled by evil men and deceivers, "whose
word doth eat as doth a canker." Dominic "saw that there was no man,
and marvelled that there was no intercessor."
It was not ungodliness that Dominic, in the first instance, determined
to war with, but ignorance and error. _These_ were to him the monster
evils, whose natural fruit was moral corruption. Get rid of them and
the depraved heart might be dealt with by-and-by. Dominic stood forth
as the determined champion of orthodoxy. "Preach the word in season,
out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort"--that was his panacea. His
success at the first was but small. Preachers with the divine fervour,
with the gift of utterance, with the power to drive truth home--are
rare. They are not to be had for the asking; they are not to be trained
in a day. Years passed, but little was achieved.
Dominic was patient He had, indeed, founded a small religious community
of sixteen brethren at St. Ronain, near Toulouse--one of these, we are
told, was an Englishman--whose aim and object were to produce an effect
through the agency of the pulpit, to confute the heretics and instruct
the unlearned. The Order, if it deserved the name, was established on
the old lines. A monastery was founded, a local habitation secured. The
maintenance of the brotherhood was provided for by a sufficient
endowment; the petty cares and anxieties of life were in the main
guarded against; but when Innocent the Third gave his formal sanction
to the new community, it was given to Dominic and his associates, on
the 8th of October, 1215, as to a house of _Augustinian Canons_, who
received permission to enjoy in their corporate capacity the endowments
which had been bestowed upon them. [Footnote: So "La Cordaire, vie de
S. Dominique" (1872), p. 120. It was, however, a very curious
community, as appears from "Ripolli Bullarium Praedicat:" I.i.]
In the following July Innocent died, and was at once succeeded by
Honorius the Third. Dominic set out for Rome, and on the 22nd of
December he received from the new Pope a bare confirmation of what his
predecessor had granted, with little more than a passing allusion to
the fact that the new canons were to be emphatically _Preachers_ of the
faith. In the autumn of 1217 Dominic turned his back upon Languedoc for
ever. He took up his residence at Rome, and at once rose high in the
favour of the Pope. His eloquence, his earnestness, his absorbing
enthusiasm, his matchless dialectic skill, his perfect scholastic
training--all combined to attract precisely those cultured churchmen
whose fastidious sense of the fitness of things revolted from the
austerities of St. Francis and the enormous demands which the Minorites
made upon their converts. While Francis was acting upon the masses from
Assisi, Dominic was stirring the dry bones to a new vitality among
scholars and ecclesiastics at Rome.
Thus far we have heard little or nothing of poverty among the more
highly educated _Friars Preachers_, as they got to be called. That
seems to have been quite an afterthought. So far as Dominic may be said
to have accepted the Voluntary Principle and, renouncing all
endowments, to have thrown himself and his followers for support upon
the alms of the faithful, so far he was a disciple of St. Francis. The
Champion of Orthodoxy was a convert to the Apostle of Poverty.
How soon the Dominicans gave in their adhesion to the distinctive tenet
of the Minorites will never now be known, nor how far St. Francis
himself adopted it from others; but a conviction that holiness of life
had deteriorated in the Church and the cloister by reason of the
excessive wealth of monks and ecclesiastics was prevalent everywhere,
and a belief was growing that sanctity was attainable only by those who
were ready to part with all their worldly possessions and give to such
as needed. Even before St. Francis had applied to Innocent the Third,
the poor men of Lyons had come to Rome begging for papal sanction to
their missionary plans; they met with little favour, and vanished from
the scene. But they too declaimed against endowments--they too were to
live on alms. The Gospel of Poverty was "_in the air_."
In 1219 the Franciscans held their second general Chapter. It was
evident that they were taking the world by storm; evident, too, that
their astonishing success was due less to their preaching than to their
self-denying lives. It was abundantly plain that this vast army of
fervent missionaries could live from day to day and work wonders in
evangelizing the masses without owning a rood of land, or having
anything to depend upon but the perennial stream of bounty which flowed
from the gratitude of the converts. If the Preaching Friars were to
succeed at such a time as this, they could only hope to do so by
exhibiting as sublime a faith as the Minorites displayed to the world.
Accordingly, in the very year after the second Chapter of the
Franciscans was held at Assisi, a general Chapter of the Dominicans was
held at Bologna, and there the profession of poverty was formally
adopted, and the renunciation of all means of support, except such as
might be offered from day to day, was insisted on. Henceforth the two
orders were to labour side by side in magnificent rivalry--mendicants
who went forth like Gideon's host with empty pitchers to fight the
battles of the Lord, and whose desires, as far as the good things of
this world went, were summed up in the simple petition, "Give us this
day our daily bread!"
* * * * * * *
Thus far the friars had scarcely been heard of in England. The
Dominicans--trained men of education, addressing themselves mainly to
the educated classes, and sure of being understood wherever Latin, the
universal medium of communication among scholars, was in daily and
hourly use--the Dominicans could have little or no difficulty in
getting an audience such as they were qualified to address. It was
otherwise with the Franciscans. If the world was to be divided between
these two great bands, obviously the Minorites' sphere of labour must
be mainly among the lowest, that of the Preaching Friars among the
cultured classes.
When the Minorites preached among Italians or Frenchmen they were
received with tumultuous welcome. They spoke the language of the
people; and in the vulgar speech of the people--rugged, plastic, and
reckless of grammar--the message came as glad tidings of great joy.
When they tried the same method in Germany, we are told, they signally
failed. The gift of tongues, alas! had ceased. That, at any rate, was
denied, even to such faith as theirs. They were met with ridicule. The
rabble of Cologne or Bremen, hoarsely grumbling out their grating
gutturals, were not to be moved by the most impassioned pleading of
angels in human form, soft though their voices might be, and musical
their tones. "Ach Himmel! was sagt er?" growled one. And peradventure
some well-meaning interpreter replied: "Zu suchen und selig zu machen."
When the Italian tried to repeat the words his utterance, not his
faith, collapsed! The German-speaking people must wait till a door
should be opened. Must England wait too? Yes! For the Franciscan
missionaries England too must wait a little while.
But England was exactly the land for the Dominican to turn to. Unhappy
England! Dominic was born in the same year that Thomas a Becket was
murdered in Canterbury Cathedral; Francis in the year before the
judgment of the Most High began to fall upon the guilty king and his
accursed progeny. Since then everything seemed to have gone wrong. The
last six years of Henry the Second's reign were years of piteous
misery, shame, and bitterness. His two elder sons died in arms against
their father, the one childless, the other, Geoffrey, with a baby boy
never destined to arrive at manhood. The two younger ones were Richard
and John. History has no story more sad than that of the wretched king,
hard at death's door, compelled to submit to the ferocious
vindictiveness of the one son, and turning his face to the wall with a
broken heart when he discovered the hateful treachery of the other. Ten
years after this Richard died childless, and King John was crowned--the
falsest, meanest, worst, and wickedest king that ever sat upon the
throne of England. And now John himself was dead; and "Woe to thee, O
land, when thy king is a child!" for Henry the Third was crowned, a boy
just nine years old.
For eight years England had lain under the terrible interdict; for most
of the time only a single bishop had remained in England. John had
small need to tax the people: he lived upon the plunder of bishops and
abbots. The churches were desolate; the worship of God in large
districts almost came to an end. Only in the Cistercian monasteries,
and in them only for a time, and to a very limited extent, were the
rites of religion continued. It is hardly conceivable that the places
of those clergy who died during the eight years of the interdict were
supplied by fresh ordinations; and some excuse may have been found for
the outrageous demands of the Pope to present to English benefices in
the fact that many cures must have been vacant, and the supply of
qualified Englishmen to succeed them had fallen short.
Strange to say, in the midst of all this religious famine, and while
the Church was being ruthlessly pillaged and her ministers put to
rebuke, there was more intellectual activity in the country than had
existed for centuries. The schools at Oxford were attracting students
from far and near; and when, in consequence of the disgraceful murder
of three _clerics_ in 1209, apparently at the instance of King John,
the whole body of masters and scholars dispersed--some to Cambridge,
others to Reading--it is said their number amounted to 3,000. These
were for the most part youths hardly as old as the undergraduates in a
Scotch university in our own time; but there was evidently an ample
supply of competent teachers, or the reputation of Oxford could not
have been maintained.
It was during the year after the Chapter of the Dominicans held at
Bologna in 1220, that the first brethren of the order arrived in
England. They were under the direction of one Gilbert de Fraxineto, who
was accompanied by twelve associates. They landed early in August,
probably at Dover. They were at once received with cordiality by
Archbishop Langton, who put their powers to the test by commanding one
of their number to preach before him. The Primate took them into his
favour, and sent them on their way. On the 10th of August they were
preaching in London, and on the 15th they appeared in Oxford, and were
welcomed as the bringers-in of new things. Their success was
unequivocal. We hardly hear of their arrival before we learn that they
were well established in their school and surrounded by eager disciples.
Be it remembered that any systematic training of young men to serve as
evangelists--any attempt to educate them directly as preachers well
furnished with arguments to confute the erring, and carefully taught to
practise the graces of oratory--had never been made in England. These
Dominicans were already the Sophists of their age, masters of dialectic
methods then in vogue, whereby disputation had been raised to the
dignity of a science. Then a scholar was looked upon as a mere
pretender who could not maintain a _thesis_ against all comers before a
crowded audience of sharp-witted critics and eager partisans, not too
nice in their expressions of dissent or approval. The exercises still
kept up for the Doctor's degree in Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge are
but the shadow of what was a reality in the past. Whether we have not
lost much in the discontinuance of the old _Acts_ and _Apponencies_,
which at least assured that a young man should be required to stand up
before a public audience to defend the reasonableness of his opinions,
may fairly be doubted. The aim of the Dominican teachers was to turn
out trained preachers furnished with all tricks of dialectic fence, and
practised to extempore speaking on the most momentous subjects.
Unfortunately the historian, when he has told us of the arrival of his
brethren, leaves us in the dark as to all their early struggles and
difficulties, and passes on to other matters with which we are less
concerned. What would we not give to know the history, say during only
twenty years, of the labours of the Preaching Friars in England? Alas!
it seems never to have been written. We are only told enough to awaken
curiousity and disappoint it.
Happily, of the early labours of the Franciscan friars in England much
fuller details have reached us, though the very existence of the
records in which they were handed down was known to very few, and the
wonderful story had been forgotten for centuries when the appearance of
the "Monumenta Franciscana" in the series of chronicles published under
direction of the Master of the Rolls in 1858 may be said to have marked
an event in literature. If the late Mr. Brewer had done no more than
bring to light the remarkable series of documents which that volume
contains, he would have won for himself the lasting gratitude of all
seekers after truth.
The Dominicans had been settled in Oxford just two years when the first
band of Franciscan brethren landed in England on the 11th of September,
1224. They landed penniless; their passage over had been paid by the
monks of Fécamp; they numbered in all nine persons, five were laymen,
four were clerics. Of the latter three were Englishmen, the fourth was
an Italian, Agnellus of Pisa by name. Agnellus had been some time
previously destined by St. Francis as the first _Minister_ for the
province of England, not improbably because he had some familiarity
with our language. He was about thirty years of age, and as yet only in
deacon's orders. Indeed, of the whole company _only one was a priest_,
a man of middle age who had made his mark and was famous as a preacher
of rare gifts and deep earnestness. He was a Norfolk man born, Richard
of Ingworth by name and presumably a priest of the diocese of Norwich.
Of the five laymen one was a Lombard, who may have had some kinsfolk
and friends in London, where he was allowed to remain as warden for
some years, and one, Lawrence of Beauvais, was a personal and intimate
friend of St. Francis, who on his death-bed gave him the habit which he
himself had worn.
The whole party were hospitably entertained for two days at the Priory
of the Holy Trinity at Canterbury. Then brother Richard Ingworth, with
another Richard--a Devonshire youth conspicuous for his ascetic fervour
and devotion, but only old enough to be admitted to minor orders--set
out for London, accompanied by the Lombard and another foreigner,
leaving behind him Agnellus and the rest, among them William of Esseby,
the third Englishman, enthusiastic and ardent as the others, but a mere
youth and as yet a novice. He, too, I conjecture to have been a Norfolk
or Suffolk man, whose birth-place, _Ashby_, in the East Anglian
dialect, would be pronounced nearly as it is written in Eccleston's
manuscript. It was arranged that Richard Ingworth should lose no time
in trying to secure some place where they might all lay their heads,
and from whence as a centre they might begin the great work they had in
hand. The Canterbury party were received into the Priest's House and
allowed to remain for a while. Soon they received permission to sleep
in a building used as a school during the day-time, and while the boys
were being taught the poor friars huddled together in a small room
adjoining, where they were confined as if they had been prisoners. When
the scholars went home the friars crept out, lit a fire and sat round
it, boiled their porridge, and mixed their small beer, sour and thick
as we are told it was, with water to make it go further, and each
contributed some word of edification to the general stock, brought
forward some homely illustration which might serve to brighten the next
sermon when it should be preached, or told a pleasant tale, thought out
during the day--a story with a moral. Of the five left behind at
Canterbury it is to be observed that no one of them was qualified as
yet to preach in the vernacular. William of Esseby was too young for
the pulpit, though he became a very effective preacher in a few years.
He was, however, doing good service as interpreter, and doubtless as
teacher of English to the rest.