SOURCE: Legge, M. Dominica. “The Friars and Pulpit Literature.” In Anglo-Norman in the Cloisters: The Influence of the Orders upon Anglo-Norman Literature, pp. 77-90. Edinburgh, Scotland: The Edinburgh University Press, 1950.

In the following essay, Legge discusses the writings of the Dominicans and the Franciscans.

The two great Orders of Mendicants had in some respects a similar history in England and in France, but while in France the Dominicans were the more important Order, supplying the Royal confessor and so winning the King's support for all their activities, including their great struggle with the University of Paris, in England it was the Franciscans who provided the greater number of scholars and Bishops, and bore the brunt of the quarrel with Oxford. In fact, Canon John Moorman ascribes the failure of the Dominicans in England to two causes: the comparative lack of heretics there and the successful rivalry of the...