The Grey Friars in Oxford

by A. G. Little

‘Enticed by the wiles of the friars and by little presents[529], these boys (for the friars cannot circumvent men of mature age) enter the Orders, nor are they afterwards allowed, according to report, to get their liberty by leaving the Order, but they are kept with them against their will until they make profession; further, they are not permitted, as it is said, to speak with their father or mother, except under the supervision and fear of a friar; an instance came to my knowledge this very day; as I came out of my inn an honest man from England, who has come to this court to obtain a remedy, told me that immediately after last Easter, the friars at the University of Oxford abducted in this manner his son who was not yet thirteen years old, and when he went there, he could not speak with him except under the supervision of a friar.’

Parents were in consequence afraid to send their sons to the Universities, and preferred to keep them at home as tillers of the soil. While the numbers both of the friaries and of their inmates had enormously increased, the number of secular students in every faculty decreased; the students at Oxford, who in his time were reckoned at 30,000, had now sunk to 6000.

Though these figures are of course preposterously exaggerated, and though the main cause of the diminution of the number of students was the Black Death, there can be no doubt of the essential truth of the accusation. In 1358 the University of Oxford passed a statute forbidding the admission of boys under eighteen to the Orders. The statute deserves to be quoted at length[530].

‘It is generally reported and proved by experience, that the nobles of this realm, those of good birth, and very many of the common people, are afraid, and therefore cease, to send their sons or relatives or others dear to them in tender youth, when they would make most advance in primitive sciences, to the University to be instructed, lest any friars of the Order of Mendicants should entice or induce such children, before they have reached years of discretion, to enter the Order of the same Mendicants; and because owing to the admission of such boys to the Mendicant Orders, the tranquillity of the students of the University has been often disturbed; therefore the said University, zealous in the bowels of piety both for the number of her sons and the quiet of her students, has ordained and decreed, that if any of the Order of Mendicants shall receive to their habit in this University, or induce, or cause to be received or induced, any such youth before the completion of his eighteenth year at least, or shall send such an one away from the University or cause him to be sent away, in order that he may be received into the same Order elsewhere: then eo ipso no one of the cloister or community of such a friar, ... being a graduate, shall during the year immediately following, read or attend lectures in this University or elsewhere where such exercises would count as discharge of the statutable requirements in this University (vel alibi quod in hac Vniversitate pro forma aliqua sibi cedat); and this penalty shall be inflicted on all those of the Order of Mendicants, and the associates of all those, who shall be convicted by credible persons of having withdrawn youths in any way from the University, or from hearing philosophy.’

The friars did not deny the charge, but defended their conduct[531], and exerted themselves to the utmost to obtain a repeal of the statute. Their efforts were successful. While a suit which they had begun in the Roman Court was yet undecided, the Provincials of the four Orders laid their grievances before the King in Parliament[532]. In 1366 the obnoxious statute was formally annulled, on condition that the friars’ suits at Rome and elsewhere against the University should cease[533]. The latter, however, did not abandon the struggle; its influence is probably to be seen in the petition of the Commons in 1402[534], that no one be allowed to enter any of the four Orders under the age of twenty-one years. The King’s answer was not favourable: he ordained merely that no friar should admit to his Order an infant under fourteen years without the assent of his father, mother, or guardians. The ordinance applied to the whole of England, and the petition of the Commons is a sign that the popularity of the friars had suffered under the attacks of Wiclif.

It has been clearly shown by recent criticism[535] that Wiclif’s enmity to the friars was confined to the last few years of his life. His earlier opponents were the monks—the religiosi possessionati. At one time he compares the poverty and mendicancy of St. Francis with the manual labour of St. Peter and St. Paul, in contrast with the possessions and worldly honours of the ecclesiastics of his time[536]. He seems to have been on terms of some intimacy with William Woodford, who may be regarded as the leader of the Oxford Minorites in their subsequent controversy with the reformer and his followers. Woodford relates[537] that

‘when I was lecturing concurrently with him on the Sentences[538] ... Wiclif used to write his answers to the arguments, which I advanced to him, in a notebook which I sent him with my arguments, and to send me back the notebook.’

Wiclif had indeed many points of sympathy, especially on questions of ecclesiastical polity, with the Friars Minors. He was in agreement with them and in antagonism to the monks and many of the bishops, in the opinion that the tribute to the Pope should be refused, and that the secular power was, under some circumstances, justified in depriving the Church of its possessions[539]. Eight or nine years before Wiclif wrote his famous tract in defence of the Parliament of 1366, an Oxford friar and doctor declared in his school that the King had the right of depriving ecclesiastics of their temporalities; he was ordered by Congregation to recant this and other opinions solemnly after a University sermon, and to pay 100s. to the University[540].

When, however, Wiclif began to call in question the Church’s doctrine on the Eucharist, he found himself in direct antagonism to the friars; and the quarrel, which began in a dogmatic difference in the schools[541], soon acquired a wider character. Wiclif’s accusations resolve themselves really into three[542]; firstly, that the friars upheld the ‘idolatrous’ doctrine of the Eucharist; secondly, that they maintained the theory of the mendicancy of Christ; thirdly, that they taught the people to rely for their salvation on letters of fraternity and prayers and masses, instead of on a good life; whence a general demoralization ensued.

‘Popis graunten no pardoun to men bot if þei be byfore verrely contritte, bot þese freris in hor lettres speken of no contricioun[543].’