most rapid, as may be seen by the Table at the end of this Chapter; some hundreds of those left were unhappily doomed to die out before 1520, but the process of their extinction was not speedy, as the same Table will show. After 1300, the Franciscans began to forsake their first love; one of the earliest tokens of the change was the rearing in 1306 of their stately new London Convent, which took many years to build, and where hundreds of the highest in the land were buried. It arose in marked contrast to the lowly churches that had been good enough for the old friars, the first disciples of St. Francis. Their great lights vanished from Oxford; the most renowned name she boasts in the Fourteenth Century is that of their sternest foe. About 1320 they were attacked in English rimes, a thing unheard of in the Thirteenth Century. We now learn that a friar Menour will turn away from the needy to grasp at the rich man's gifts; the brethren will fight over a wealthy friend's body, but will not stir out of the cloister at a poor man's death; they
‘wolde preche more for a busshel of whete,
Than for to bringe a soule from helle out of the hete.’[1]
These rimes were written about the date of Wickliffe's birth. The Franciscans had by this time done their work in England, though they were to drag on a sluggish life in our shires for two hundred years longer. Curious it is, that the time of their fiery activity coin-
- ↑ Political Songs (Camden Society), p. 331. Churchmen, lawyers, physicians, knights, and shopkeepers are all assailed in this piece.
