London and at Oxford, they found a cordial welcome from the Dominicans, eating in their refectories, and sleeping in their dormitories, until they were able to erect modest quarters in both places.  The brethren of the new order excited unbounded enthusiasm.  Necessity and choice combined to compel them to interpret their vow of poverty as St. Francis would have wished.  They laboured with their own hands at the construction of their humble churches.  The friars at Oxford knew the pangs of debt and hunger, rejected pillows as a vain luxury, and limited the use of boots and shoes to the sick and infirm.  The faithful saw the brethren singing songs as they picked their way over the frozen mud or hard snow, blood marking the track of their naked feet, without their being conscious of it.  The joyous radiance of Francis himself illuminated the lives of his followers.  “The friars,” writes their chronicler, “were so full of fun among themselves that a deaf mute could hardly refrain from laughter at seeing them.”  With the same glad spirit they laboured for the salvation of souls, the cure of sickness, and the relief of distress.  The emotional feeling of the age quickly responded to their zeal.  Within a few years other houses had arisen at Gloucester, at Nottingham, at Stamford, at Worcester, at Northampton, at Cambridge, at Lincoln, at Shrewsbury.  In a generation there was hardly a town of importance in England that had not its Franciscan convent, and over against it a rival Dominican house.

The esteem felt for the followers of Francis and Dominic led to an extraordinary extension of the mendicant type.  New orders of friars arose, preserving the essential attribute of absolute poverty, though differing from each other and from the two prototypes in various particulars.  Some of these lesser orders found their way to England.  In the same year as Agnellus, there came to England the Trinitarian friars, called also the Maturins, from the situation of their first house in Paris, an order whose special function was the redemption of captives.  In 1240 returning crusaders brought back with them the first Carmelite friars, for whom safer quarters had to be found than in their original abodes in Syria.  This society spread widely, and in 1287, to the disgust of the older monks, it laid aside the party-coloured habit, forced upon it in derision by the infidels, and adopted the white robe, which gave them their popular name of White Friars.  Hard upon these, in 1244, came also the Crutched Friars, so called from the red cross set upon their backs or breasts; but these were never deeply rooted in England.  The multiplication of orders of friars became an abuse, so that, at the Council of Lyons of 1245, Innocent IV abolished all save four.  Besides Dominicans and Franciscans the pope only continued the Carmelites, and an order first seen in England a few years later, the Austin friars or the hermits of the order of St. Augustine.  These made up the traditional four