On the other hand, neither did the Mendicant Orders, instituted at a later
date purposely to supply what the older Orders, as well as the secular
clergy, seemed to have grown incapable of furnishing, any longer satisfy
the reason of their being. In the fourteenth century the Dominicans or
Black Friars, who at London dwelt in such magnificence that king and
Parliament often preferred a sojourn with them to abiding at Westminster,
had in general grown accustomed to concentrate their activity upon the
spiritual direction of the higher classes. But though they counted among
them Englishmen of eminence (one of these was Chaucer's friend, "the
philosophical Strode"), they in truth never played a more than secondary
part in this country, to whose soil the delicate machinery of the
Inquisition, of which they were by choice the managers, was never
congenial. Of far greater importance for the population of England at
large was the Order of the Franciscans or (as they were here wont to call
themselves or to be called) Minorites or Grey Friars. To them the poor
had habitually looked for domestic ministrations, and for the inspiring
and consoling eloquence of the pulpit; and they had carried their labours
into the midst of the suffering population, not afraid of association with
that poverty which they were by their vow themselves bound to espouse, or
of contact with the horrors of leprosy and the plague. Departing from the
short-sighted policy of their illustrious founder, they had become a
learned, as well as a ministering and preaching Order; and it was
precisely from among them that, at Oxford and elsewhere, sprang a
succession of learned monks, whose names are inseparably connected with
some of the earliest English growths of philosophical speculation and
scientific research. Nor is it possible to doubt that in the middle of
the thirteenth century the monks of this Order at Oxford had exercised an
appreciable influence upon the beginnings of a political struggle of
unequalled importance for the progress of our constitutional life. But in