Medieval England by Mary Bateson

Author:Mary Bateson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pronoun

X. THE CHURCH, EDUCATION AND LEARNING

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1. ARRIVAL OF THE FRIARS — 2, Deficiencies of the parochial system — 3. Types of secular clergy — 4. Hermits and anchorites as teachers — 5. Schools — 6. The Universities — 7. New learning — 8. Verse — 9. Minstrels and players.

1. In 1224 four clerks and five lay Franciscans were put across the Channel by the charity of the monks of Fecamp; and the arrival of this small band of penniless persons was fraught with important consequences. They were quartered for a while in the monastery of Christchurch, Canterbury, and finally settled in a house, held by the borough “to their use.” This system of trusteeship was arranged in order that the Franciscan vow of poverty might be kept as closely to the letter as possible: it was a system destined to have important consequences in the history of English law. The youngest of the orders, that of the Friars Minor, or Grey Friars (the dress is now brown), was destined to occupy an intermediate position between the parish priests and the monks, and to fill all the gaps still left in the medieval scheme of religious administration, of education, of charity. Although of monks and clerks it was probably generally felt that there were more than enough, the desire to do more for the religious life of the laity, once suggested, soon kindled to a great flame. The monks were, by rule at least, secluded; the regular canons had become almost equally secluded; the beneficed clerks were either rich and absent from their parishes, or if resident too poor and ill-educated to do much in the way of charity or teaching for those who were poorer still. The story of the spread of the Friars Minor through England is known in great detail from contemporary records. Everywhere they were well received until the monasteries woke up to the fact that dangerous rivals were in the field, that abbots and others were leaving the monasteries to take up the more active life of the new order. As with all the other orders, it was a new and sterner asceticism that offered the initial attraction. To wander barefoot through the country, carrying in the rough woollen hood only flour, salt and a few figs, often to lack a fire, to wait upon lepers, to dwell by the gaol, to reject all comforts, to follow the way that the master Francis had trod, these were ideas that in the thirteenth century set men’s hearts on fire with longing, and induced many knights to enter the order. Matthew Paris describes the friars as building schools and little churches in the suburbs of towns, travelling and hearing confessions. Their peripatetic character gave them a certain power: Matthew Paris, with his usual penetration and knowledge of human nature, observes that men were more ready to confess to a friar who left the village next day, than to the priest whom they were certain often to meet again.

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