When Francis tried to enforce the rule of poverty, his rigor gave rise to most serious dissensions, which began in his own lifetime and ended after his death in open schism.  Some of his followers were not pleased with his views on that subject.  They resisted his extreme strictness, and after his death they continued to advocate the holding of property.  The popes tried to settle the quarrel, but ever and anon it broke out afresh with volcanic fierceness.  They finally interpreted the rule of poverty to mean that the friars could not hold property in their own names, but they might enjoy its use.  Under this interpretation of the rule, the beggars soon became very rich.  Matthew of Paris said:  “The friars who have been founded hardly forty years have built even in the present day in England residences as lofty as the palaces of our kings.”  But the better element among the Franciscans refused to consent to such a palpable evasion of the rule.  A portion of this class separated themselves from the Franciscans, rejected their authority, and formed a new sect called the Fratricelli, or Little Brothers.  It is very important to keep the history of this name clearly in mind, for it frequently appears in the Reformation period and has been the cause of much misunderstanding.  The word “Fratricelli” came to be a term of derision applied to any one affecting the dress or the habits of the monks.  When heretical sects arose, it was applied to them as a stigma, but it was used first by a sect of rigid Franciscans who deserted their order, adopted this name as their own, and exulted in its use.  The quarrel among the monks led to a variety of complications and is intricately interwoven with the political and religious history of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  “These rebellious Franciscans,” says Mosheim, “though fanatical and superstitious in some respects, deserve an eminent rank among those who prepared the way for the Reformation in Europe, and who excited in the minds of the people a just aversion to Rome.”

The Mendicants were especially active in educational work.  This is to be attributed to several causes.  Unquestionably the general and increasing interest in theological doctrines and the craving for knowledge affected the monastic orders.  Europe was just arousing from her medieval slumbers.  The faint rays of the Reformation dawn were streaking the horizon.  The intellect as well as the conscience was touched by the Spirit of God.  The revolt against moral iniquity was often accompanied by skepticism concerning the authority and dogmas of the church.  Questions were being asked that ignorant monks could not answer.  Too long had the church ignored these symptoms of the approach of a new order of things.  The church was forced to meet the heretics on their own ground, to offset the example of their simplicity and purity of life by exalting the neglected standards of self-denial, and to silence them, if possible, by exposing their errors.  Then came the Franciscans, with their austere simplicity and their insistence upon poverty.  Then also appeared the Dominicans, or as they were called, “The Watch-dogs of the Church,” who not only barked the church awake, but tried to devour the heretics.