Men and women of all ranks, while still living in the world and fulfilling their ordinary occupations, associated themselves to the mendicant brotherhoods.  Besides these tertiaries, as they were called, still wider circles sought the friars’ direction in all spiritual matters and showed eagerness to be buried within their sanctuaries.  Nor did the friars limit themselves to pastoral care.  They won a unique place in the intellectual history of the time.  They made themselves the spokesmen of all the movements of the age.  They were eager to make peace, and Agnellus himself mediated between Henry III. and the earl marshal.  They were the strenuous preachers of the crusades, whether against the infidel or against Frederick II.  The Franciscans taught a new and more methodical devotion to the Virgin Mother.  The friars upheld the highest papal claims, were constantly selected as papal agents and tax-gatherers, and yet even this did not deprive them of their influence over Englishmen.  Their zeal for truth often made them defenders of unpopular causes, and it was much to their honour that they did not hesitate to incur the displeasure of the Londoners by their anxiety to save innocent Jews accused of the murder of Christian children.  The parish clergy hated and envied them as successful rivals, and bitterly resented the privilege which they received from Alexander IV of hearing confessions throughout the world.  Not less strong was the hostility of the monastic orders which is often expressed in Matthew Paris’s free-spoken abuse of them.  They were accused of terrorising dying men out of their possessions, of laxity in the confessional, of absolving their friends too easily, of overweening ambition and restless meddlesomeness.  They were violent against heretics and enemies of the Church.  They answered hate with hate.  They despised the seculars as drones and the monks as lazy and corrupt.  The dissensions between the various orders of friars, and particularly between the sober and intellectual Dominicans and the radical and mystic Franciscans, were soon as bitter as those between monks and friars, or monks and seculars.  But when all allowances have been made, the good that they wrought far outbalanced the evil, and in England at least, the mendicant orders exhibited a nobler conception of religion, and of men’s duly to their fellowmen than had as yet been set before the people.  If the main result of their influence was to strengthen that cosmopolitan conception of Christendom of which the papacy was the head and the friars the agents, their zeal for righteousness often led them beyond their own rigid platform, and Englishmen honoured the wandering friar as the champion of the nation’s cause.