It is improbable, however, that the indulgences granted by the friars differed from the other indulgences of the Middle Ages, which in theory absolved from the temporal punishment, not from the sin and eternal punishment. Wiclif may have classed with the friars the ‘pardoners’ who did not belong to any of the four Orders[544]. The records relating to the Franciscan house at Oxford throw no light on the matter, which indeed belongs to the general history of the Mendicants, not to the history of a particular convent. Wiclif’s charges amount practically to this: the friars were the foremost champions of the external, unspiritual form of religion, which he laboured to destroy: they were no longer leaders of thought, but obstacles to progress.
Though Wiclif’s writings, especially his English writings, are full of violent invective against the friars[545], it is difficult to find in them any definite accusations of the grosser forms of immorality. One instance will sufficiently illustrate the difference between Wiclif and his followers.
‘Friars also,’ says the former, ‘be foully envenomed with ghostly sin of Sodom, and so be more cursed than the bodily Sodomites that were suddenly dead by hard vengeance of God; for they do ghostly lechery by God’s word, when they preach more their own findings for worldly muck, than Christ’s Gospel for saving of men’s souls[546].’
‘Jack Upland’ improves on this, and does not scruple to impute to the friars generally the vilest sins.
‘Your freres ben taken alle day
with wymmen and wifes,
bot of your privey sodomye
spake I not yette[547].’
At Oxford the seculars, always numerically strong and jealous of the regulars, rallied to Wiclif’s standard; while the Mendicants roused the anger of the University by appealing to external authority. The friars were accused of having made use of their position as confessors to stir up the peasant revolt. On the 18th of February, 1382, the heads of the four Mendicant Convents at Oxford sent a letter to John of Gaunt, denying the charge and begging his protection[548]; all evils were attributed to them, and their lives were in danger. Their chief enemy was Nicholas Hereford. In Lent of the same year Hereford preached a University sermon at St. Mary’s, in which he argued that no ‘religious’ should be admitted to any degree at Oxford[549]. He was appointed by the Chancellor to deliver the principal English sermon of the year at St. Frideswide’s Cross on Ascension Day (May 15th), and used the opportunity to attack monks and friars and mendicancy in general[550]. On the 19th of the same month, the ‘Council of the Earthquake’ met at the Blackfriars in London, and condemned ten of Wiclif’s conclusions as heretical and fourteen as erroneous; among the seventeen doctors of divinity who took part in the council were four Minorites, the Oxford Franciscans being represented by Hugo Karlelle and Thomas Bernewell[551]. The Archbishop sent Peter Stokes, a Carmelite, to publish the condemnation at Oxford. The Chancellor and Proctors resented this interference with their rights, and the general feeling was strong in Wiclif’s favour. Stokes and his brethren went in fear of their lives; when the Carmelite ‘determined’ against Philip Repyngdon on the 10th of June, men were seen in the schools with arms concealed under their clothes. At length, on June 15th, the Chancellor was compelled, by the King’s command, to publish the condemnation of the twenty-four conclusions;
‘and he thus so roused the seculars against the religious that many of the latter feared death, the seculars crying out that they wanted to destroy the University, though really they (the religious) only defended the cause of the Church[552].’
In November the University tried to turn the tables on its adversaries; in an assembly of the clerks at St. Frideswide’s, the Chancellor accused some of the orthodox party (among them a Minorite friar) of heresy[553]. But from this time the sacramental controversy tended to retire into the background, and the alliance of monks and friars, which Wiclif’s attack on the faith had called into being[554], came to an end. In 1392, Henry Crompe, a Cistercian monk, who had been a prominent opponent of Wiclif, was charged with having determined on several occasions against the right of the friars to hear confessions[555]. Friar John Tyssyngton and other Minorites took part in his condemnation in a Convocation held in the house of the Carmelites at Stamford. In their anxiety to silence their adversaries, the Mendicant Orders proved false to the tradition common to all the great mediaeval Universities—the tradition of intellectual freedom; they upheld the claim of Archbishop Arundel to visit the University, and lent their support to the rigid censorship which he established[556]. But it is only fair to remember that, years before this, the authority of the Church had been invoked against the teaching of the friars themselves. In 1368 Simon Langham sent thirty errors of the friars to the University, and it was enacted that no one should presume to defend or approve these tenets in the schools or elsewhere ‘on pain of the greater excommunication[557].’
The history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries affords many other illustrations of the hostility with which the friars, and especially the Minorites, were regarded by the University. The subject of academical degrees, and of the action taken by the University against the ‘wax-doctors,’ has been treated elsewhere. A statute, which probably dates from the first half of the fifteenth century, provides that both the collatores of University sermons shall, if possible, be seculars[558]. Wood says that in the years 1423 and 1424 there
‘were nothing but heartburnings in the University occasioned by the Friers their preaching up and down against tithes.’