in coarse frock of serge with a girdle of rope round their waist, wandered
barefooted as missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and
Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and toiled among the poor.


[Sidenote: The Friars and the Towns]

To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was a religious
revolution. They had been left for the most part to the worst and most
ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose sole subsistence lay in his
fees. Burgher and artizan were left to spell out what religious instruction
they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the Church's ritual or the
scriptural pictures and sculptures which were graven on the walls of its
minsters. We can hardly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm which welcomed
the itinerant preacher whose fervid appeal, coarse wit, and familiar story
brought religion into the fair and the market place. In England, where the
Black Friars of Dominic arrived in 1221, the Grey Friars of Francis in
1224, both were received with the same delight. As the older orders had
chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. They had hardly landed at
Dover before they made straight for London and Oxford. In their ignorance
of the road the first two Grey Brothers lost their way in the woods between
Oxford and Baldon, and fearful 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