orders of friars of later history.  Yet even the decree of a council could not stay the growth of new mendicant types.  In 1257 the Friars of the Penance of Jesus Christ, popularly styled Friars of the Sack, from their coarse sackcloth garb, settled down in London, exempted by papal dispensation from the fate of suppression; and even later than this King Richard’s son, Edmund of Cornwall, established a community of Bonhommes at Ashridge in Buckinghamshire.

The friars were not recluses, like the older orders, but active preachers and teachers of the people.  The parish clergy seldom held a strong position in medieval life.  The estimation in which the monastic ideal was held limited their influence.  They were, as a rule, not much raised above the people among whom they laboured.  If the parish priest were a man of rank or education, he was too often a non-resident and a pluralist, bestowing little personal attention on his parishioners.  Nor were the numerous parishes served by monks in much better plight.  The monastery took the tithes and somehow provided for the services; but the efforts of Grosseteste to secure the establishment of permanent stipendiary vicarages in his diocese exemplify the reluctance of the religious to give their appropriations the benefit of permanent pastors, paid on an adequate scale.  It was an exceptional thing for the parish clergymen to do more than discharge perfunctorily the routine duties of their office, and preaching was almost unknown among them.  The friars threw themselves into pastoral work with such devotion as to compel the reluctant admiration of their natural rivals, the monks.  “At first,” says Matthew Paris,[1] “the Preachers and the Minorites lived a life of poverty and extreme sanctity.  They busied themselves in preaching, hearing confessions, the recital of divine service, in teaching and study.  They embraced voluntary poverty for God’s sake, abandoning all their worldly goods and not even reserving for themselves their food for to-morrow.”  A special field of labour was in the crowded suburbs of the larger towns, where so often they chose to erect their first convents.  The care of the sick and of lepers was their peculiar function.  Their sympathy and charity carried everything before them, and they remained the chief teachers of the poor down to the Reformation.  They ingratiated themselves with the rich as much as with the poor.  Henry III. and Edward selected mendicants as their confessors.  The strongest and holiest of the bishops, Grosseteste, became their most active friend.  Simon of Montfort sought the advice and friendship of a friar like Adam Marsh.  The mere fact that Stephen Langton and Peter des Roches were their first patrons in England shows how they appealed alike to the best and worst clerical types of the time.

    [1] Chron.  Maj., v., 194.