above all to carry the Gospel to the poor.  The work was to be done by an utter reversal of the older monasticism, by seeking personal salvation in effort for the salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister for the preacher, the monk for the “brother” or friar.  To force the new “brethren” into entire dependence on those among whom they laboured their vow of Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the “Begging Friars” were to subsist solely on alms, they might possess neither money nor lands, the very houses in which they lived were to be held in trust for them by others.  The tide of popular enthusiasm which welcomed their appearance swept before it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older orders, the opposition of the parochial priesthood.  Thousands of brethren gathered in a few years round Francis and Dominic; and the begging preachers, clad in coarse frock of serge with a girdle of rope round their waist, wandered barefooted as missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and toiled among the poor.

[Sidenote:  The Friars and the Towns]

To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was a religious revolution.  They had been left for the most part to the worst and most ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose sole subsistence lay in his fees.  Burgher and artizan were left to spell out what religious instruction they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the Church’s ritual or the scriptural pictures and sculptures which were graven on the walls of its minsters.  We can hardly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm which welcomed the itinerant preacher whose fervid appeal, coarse wit, and familiar story brought religion into the fair and the market place.  In England, where the Black Friars of Dominic arrived in 1221, the Grey Friars of Francis in 1224, both were received with the same delight.  As the older orders had chosen the country, the Friars chose the town.  They had hardly landed at Dover before they made straight for London and Oxford.  In their ignorance of the road the first two Grey Brothers lost their way in the woods between Oxford and Baldon, and fearful of night and of the floods turned aside to a grange of the monks of Abingdon.  Their ragged clothes and foreign gestures, as they prayed for hospitality, led the porter to take them for jongleurs, the jesters and jugglers of the day, and the news of this break in the monotony of their lives brought prior, sacrist, and cellarer to the door to welcome them and witness their tricks.  The disappointment was too much for the temper of the monks, and the brothers were kicked roughly from the gate to find their night’s lodging under a tree.  But the welcome of the townsmen made up everywhere for the ill-will and opposition of both clergy and monks.  The work of the Friars was physical as well as moral.  The rapid progress of population within the boroughs had outstripped the sanitary regulations