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 in 1272, no one questioned his right to be crowned king when he returned.

Two things rendered Henry's long reign memorable: the coming of the Friars, and the beginning of Parliament. The Friars were the last offshoot of the dying tree of monkery. Wise people began to see that a monk who shut himself up in a monastery might no doubt save his own soul, but could do little for the souls of other people. What was wanted was men who could go about in the world preaching and doing good. Two great men, St. Dominic, a Spaniard, and St. Francis, an Italian, founded brotherhoods of ‘Friars’ (the word means brothers), who were to fulfil this mission. It was a splendid ideal, and St. Francis is one of the most beautiful figures in history. The Friars came and lodged with the very poor in the filthy slums, and did such work as our clergy are doing to-day in all great cities. Others walked all over the land, preaching in the streets and villages. But soon this movement also began to fail; for pious laymen heaped lands and riches on these brotherhoods, until in little more than a century they had become as rich and as worldly as the monks. Moreover, the ordinary parish and town priests, who suffered even more than the laymen from the greedy demands of the Pope, began to think of monks and friars alike as mere agents of the Pope, as something foreign to the ‘national Church’. Hence, after 1300, there were few gifts of land to monks or friars; people preferred rather to found schools and colleges. Both at Oxford and Cambridge colleges had been founded before that year.

The second thing, the beginning of Parliament, is even more important. Ever since Magna Charta had