of the Middle Ages, and fever or plague or the more terrible scourge of leprosy festered in the wretched hovels of the suburbs.  It was to haunts such as these that Francis had pointed his disciples, and the Grey Brethren at once fixed themselves in the meanest and poorest quarters of each town.  Their first work lay in the noisome lazar-houses; it was amongst the lepers that they commonly chose the site of their homes.  At London they settled in the shambles of Newgate; at Oxford they made their way to the swampy ground between its walls and the streams of Thames.  Huts of mud and timber, as mean as the huts around them, rose within the rough fence and ditch that bounded the Friary.  The order of Francis made a hard fight against the taste for sumptuous buildings and for greater personal comfort which characterized the time.  “I did not enter into religion to build walls,” protested an English provincial when the brethren pressed for a larger house; and Albert of Pisa ordered a stone cloister which the burgesses of Southampton had built for them to be razed to the ground.  “You need no little mountains to lift your heads to heaven,” was his scornful reply to a claim for pillows.  None but the sick went shod.  An Oxford Friar found a pair of shoes one morning, and wore them at matins.  At night he dreamed that robbers leapt on him in a dangerous pass between Gloucester and Oxford with, shouts of “Kill, kill!” “I am a friar,” shrieked the terror-stricken brother.  “You lie,” was the instant answer, “for you go shod.”  The Friar lifted up his foot in disproof, but the shoe was there.  In an agony of repentance he woke and flung the pair out of window.

[Sidenote:  Revival of Theology]

It was with less success that the order struggled against the passion of the time for knowledge.  Their vow of poverty, rigidly interpreted as it was by their founders, would have denied them the possession of books or materials for study.  “I am your breviary, I am your breviary,” Francis cried passionately to a novice who asked for a psalter.  When the news of a great doctor’s reception was brought to him at Paris, his countenance fell.  “I am afraid, my son,” he replied, “that such doctors will be the destruction of my vineyard.  They are the true doctors who with the meekness of wisdom show forth good works for the edification of their neighbours.”  One kind of knowledge indeed their work almost forced on them.  The popularity of their preaching soon led them to the deeper study of theology; within a short time after their establishment in England we find as many as thirty readers or lecturers appointed at Hereford, Leicester, Bristol, and other places, and a regular succession of teachers provided at each University.  The Oxford Dominicans lectured on theology in the nave of their new church while philosophy was taught in the cloister.  The first provincial of the Grey Friars built a school in their Oxford house and persuaded Grosseteste to lecture there.  His influence after