The great difference between the monks and the friars was that the ideal of the monastic life was seclusion from the world for prayer and meditation with a view to the cultivation of one’s own soul; that of the friar’s life was devotion to active work. The great economical difference was that the monks were individually vowed to poverty, but as communities they were wealthy, while the friars were vowed to have no property individually or collectively, and to live of the alms of the people.
At first the friars were very successful in England, as elsewhere. Bishops like Stephen Langton and Grostete patronized them. Before long members of the mendicant orders became themselves bishops and archbishops. They sent their young men to the universities, and cultivated learning so successfully that they soon became the most famous teachers in the universities of Europe. Among the people generally they effected a great revival of religion, which Sir J. Stephen compares with the revival in more modern times effected by the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield.
The friaries were always founded in, or in the suburbs of, the larger towns, for their mission was to the masses of the people. But they had a system of itineration, which seems to have divided the country into districts, and sent the friars two and two, visiting not only the villages but the houses of the gentry and farmers. This brought the friars into rivalry with the parish priests. In the towns the Dominicans often built a large church, planned so as to form an auditorium, and attracted large congregations by their popular preaching. The friars laid themselves out also for special services, which would attract the sluggish and popularize religion, such as miracle plays and the observance of special festivals. In the villages the itinerant friar preached in the church or churchyard, and heard the confessions of those who chose to come to him; and there were many who preferred to confess their misdoings to a comparative stranger, who did not live among them, rather than to their parish priest.
So says Chaucer—
He had power of confession,
As said himself, more than a curate,
For of his order he was licentiate.
Full sweetly heard he confession,
And pleasant was his absolution.
He was an easy man to give penance
There as he wist to have a good pittance,
For unto a poor order for to give
Is sign that a man is well yshrive.
“Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.”
Both in town and country they offered the fraternity of their convent to benefactors, with its prayers for their good estate while living, and sought to have masses for the dead entrusted to them on the ground that a convent of friars would pray them out of purgatory ten times as soon as a single parish priest.
“Thomas, Thomas, so might I ride or go,
And by that lord that cleped is St. Ive,
N’ere[410] thou our brother shouldest thou not thrive.
In our chapter pray we day and night
To Christ that he here send hele and might[411]
Thy body for to welden hastilee.”
The rustic roughly answers—
“God wot, quoth he, I nothing thereof feel,
So help me Christ as I in fewe years
Have spended upon divers manner freres
Full many a pound, yet fare I never the bet.”
“Ye sayn me thus how that I am your brother.
Ye, certes, quod the friar, trusteth wee,
I took our dame the letter under our sel.”[412]
Chaucer, “The Sompnour’s Tale.”
So “Piers Plowman” says—