the Renascence.  And it is to the same spirit of fearless enquiry as well as to the strong popular sympathies which their very constitution necessitated that we must attribute the influence which the Friars undoubtedly exerted in the coming struggle between the people and the Crown.  Their position is clearly and strongly marked throughout the whole contest.  The University of Oxford, which soon fell under the direction of their teaching, stood first in its resistance to Papal exactions and its claim of English liberty.  The classes in the towns, on whom the influence of the Friars told most directly, were steady supporters of freedom throughout the Barons’ Wars.

[Sidenote:  Its Political Influence]

Politically indeed the teaching of the schoolmen was of immense value, for it set on a religious basis and gave an intellectual form to the constitutional theory of the relations between king and people which was slowly emerging from the struggle with the Crown.  In assuming the responsibility of a Christian king to God for the good government of his realm, in surrounding the pledges whether of ruler or ruled with religious sanctions, the mediaeval Church entered its protest against any personal despotism.  The schoolmen pushed further still to the doctrine of a contract between king and people; and their trenchant logic made short work of the royal claims to irresponsible power and unquestioning obedience.  “He who would be in truth a king,” ran a poem which embodies their teaching at this time in pungent verse—­“he is a ‘free king’ indeed if he rightly rule himself and his realm.  All things are lawful to him for the government of his realm, but nothing is lawful to him for its destruction.  It is one thing to rule according to a king’s duty, another to destroy a kingdom by resisting the law.”  “Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be known what the generality, to whom their laws are best known, think on the matter.  They who are ruled by the laws know those laws best; they who make daily trial of them are best acquainted with them; and since it is their own affairs which are at stake they will take the more care and will act with an eye to their own peace.”  “It concerns the community to see what sort of men ought justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm.”  The constitutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the whole nation to deliberate and decide on its own affairs and to have a voice in the selection of the administrators of government, had never been so clearly stated before.  But the importance of the Friar’s work lay in this, that the work of the scholar was supplemented by that of the popular preacher.  The theory of government wrought out in cell and lecture-room was carried over the length and breadth of the land by the mendicant brother, begging his way from town to town, chatting with farmer or housewife at the cottage door, and setting up his portable pulpit in village green or market-place.  His open-air sermons, ranging from impassioned devotion to coarse story and homely mother wit, became the journals as well as the homilies of the day; political and social questions found place in them side by side with spiritual matters; and the rudest countryman learned his tale of a king’s oppression or a patriot’s hopes as he listened to the rambling, passionate, humorous discourse of the begging friar.