The peculiar circumstances of the Church in Brabant favoured these pretensions. The one great ecclesiastical power in that province, where no bishop had his See, was monasticism, and when the burgher was in the heyday of his magnificence monasticism was spiritually and temporally at a low ebb. The fiery zeal which characterised the days of the Cluniac revival had long ago flickered out. Discipline had become sadly relaxed, the monk had ceased to be the saint and the popular hero he had been in days of yore, and the alms of the faithful no longer flowed into his coffers. Another source of revenue, too, had all but dried up. Owing to the fall in the purchasing power of money, the produce of his manorial dues, which he had no power to raise, had diminished almost to vanishing point. Thus was the abbot, at his wits' end how to keep order amongst his rebellious family and make both ends meet, sadly handicapped in his contests with his all-powerful foe, from whom, indeed, he was not unfrequently constrained to borrow at usurious rates of interest. But although the burgher looked askance at the old religious orders, for some reason or other his antipathy to the monk did not extend itself to the friar. He never quarrelled with the 'watch dogs of the Lord,' and with the disciples of 'the poor man of Assisi' his relations were most cordial. Perhaps as a practical business man the object of their mission appealed more to his sympathies; perhaps he thought he had nothing to fear from the children of the gentle saint who had taken for his bride the Lady Poverty. But by a strange irony of fate it was not the monk but the friar who hurled the first blow at his dominion. It was from the lips of the friar who toiled among the poverty-stricken masses that these poor folk learned, for the first time, the dignity of man, and no teacher was needed to awaken in their souls the consciousness of their degradation. They experienced it every day: when they lounged about the market-place on Monday morning waiting, often in vain, for the supply of labour generally exceeded the demand, for someone to hire them at wages fixed by the town magistrates, men who themselves were employers of labour and in whose appointment the people had no voice; when, working at home at their looms, they received the visit of the guild inspector, who had the right to ransack their hovels at all hours, with a view to assuring himself of the excellence of their work, and who received as his salary a portion of the fine imposed for any fraud detected. This was their normal lot in times of prosperity, and when work was slack, or when there was no work at all, as was sometimes the case when wool was not forthcoming from England, the wounds inflicted on their self-respect went deeper and smarted more: then were they constrained to choose between two evils—either they must starve, and, worse still, see their wives and their little ones starve; or they must band together and parade the streets whining for that bread which they could no longer win. Well might the friar preach to men set in such straits the beauty of Christian humility and of Christian resignation, and bid them despise as dross that gold which they could not obtain. The weavers and dyers who hung on his lips possessed, of earthly goods, very often only the rags they stood up in; and the wealth which they saw around them, and which they could never hope to enjoy, they knew very well was in many cases the fruit of their underpaid toil, and that the holders of it, of like origin with themselves, were not only their rulers and taskmasters, but corrupt stewards of the common-weal—the men who managed the city, and managed it in their own interests.

What wonder, then, that they soon began to confound contempt for riches with contempt for the rich, and that presently contempt engendered hatred. Were not the oppressors of the poor the enemies of Jesus Christ? Was it not easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? Had not one of their preachers[8] told them that the rich man, even if he were righteous, was less worthy of esteem than the woman of the street?

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[CHAPTER VIII]
The Coelveren and the Blankarden