Monasticism no less than the papacy was of the very essence of the Church of the Middle Ages.  Yet the monastic ideal had no longer the force that it had in previous generations, and even the latest embodiments of the religious life had declined from their original popularity.  Pope John XXII. himself, in his warfare against William of Ockham and the Spiritual Franciscans who had supported Louis of Bavaria, denied in good round terms the Franciscan doctrine of “evangelical poverty”.  Ockham was now dead, and with him perished the last of the great cosmopolitan schoolmen, of whose birth indeed England might boast, but who early forsook Oxford for Paris.  Conspicuous among the younger academical generation was Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh, whose bitter attacks on the fundamental principles underlying the mendicant theory of the regular life are indicative of the changing temper of the age.  A distinguished Oxford scholar, a learned and pungent writer, a popular preacher, a reputed saint, and a good friend of the pope, Fitzralph made himself, about 1357, the champion of the secular clergy against the friars by writing a treatise to prove that absolute poverty was neither practised nor commended by the apostles.[1] The indignant mendicants procured the archbishop’s citation to Avignon, and it was a striking proof of the ineffectiveness of recent legislation that Edward III. allowed him to plead his cause before the curia.  By 1358 the friars gained the day, but their efforts to get Fitzralph’s opinions condemned were frustrated by his death in 1360.  Fitzralph had the sympathy not only of the seculars, but of the “possessioners,” or property-holding monks.

    [1] See his De Pauperie Salvatoris, lib. i.-iv., printed by
    R.L.  Poole, as appendix to Wycliffe, De Dominio Divino.

The period of experiments in economic and anti-clerical legislation was also marked by other important new laws, such as the ordinance of the staple of 1354, providing that wool, leather, and other commodities were only to be sold at certain staple towns, a measure soon to be modified by the law of 1362, which settled the staple at Calais; the ordinance of 1357 for the government of Ireland, to which later reference will be made; the statute making English the language of the law courts in 1362, and a drastic act against purveyance in 1365.  The statute of treasons of 1352, which laid down seven several offences as alone henceforth to be regarded as treason, also demands attention.  Its classification is rude and unsystematic.  While the slaying of the king’s ministers or judges, and the counterfeiting of the great seal or the king’s coin, are joined with the compassing the death of the king or his wife or heir, adherence to the king’s enemies, the violation of the queen or the king’s eldest daughter, as definite acts of treason, its omission to brand other notable indications of disloyally as traitorous, inspired the judges of later generations to elaborate the doctrine of constructive treason in order to extend in practice the scope of the act.  It was, however, an advance for nobles and commons to have set any limitations whatever to the wide power claimed by the courts of defining treason.