Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/826

 790 F R I F 11 I Reformation movement in Germany soon caused him to be suspected as a heretic, and led to his imprisonment for some mouths. On being at the instance of Wolsey released from confinement, towards the close of 1526 or early in 1527, ho fled to the Continent, where he appears to have resided chiefly at the newly founded Protestant university of Marburg, and to have been associated with Tyndal in many of the literary labours of the latter. At Marburg he became acquainted with several scholars and Reformers of note, and particularly with the famous Patrick Hamilton. Frith s first publication in fact was a translation of Hamilton s Places, made shortly after the martyrdom of their author ; and soon afterwards the Revelation of Anti christ, a translation from the German, appeared, along with A Pistle to the Christen Header, by &quot; Richard Brightwall &quot; (supposed to be Frith), and An Antithesis ivherein are com pared togeder Christes Actes and our Holye Father the Popes, dated &quot;at Malborow in the lande of Hesse,&quot; 12th July 1529. His Disputacyon of Purgatorye, a treatise in three books, against Rastell, Sir T. More, and Fisher (bishop of Rochester) respectively, was published at the same place in 1531. In 1532, probably in July or August, he ventured back to England, apparently on some business to which ho and Tyndal attached importance in connexion with the prior oif Reading. Warrants for his arrest were almost imme diately issued at the instance of Sir T. More, then lord chan cellor. For some weeks Frith successfully evaded pursuit, but ultimately, in December, he fell into the hands of the authorities at Milton Shore in Essex, as he was on the point of making his escape to Flanders. The rigour of his im prisonment in the Tower was somewhat abated when Sir T. Audley succeeded to the chancellorship, and it was under stood that both Cromwell and Cranmer were disposed to show great leniency. But the treacherous circulation of a manuscript &quot; lytle treatise &quot; on the sacraments, which Frith had written for the information of a friend, and without any view to publication, served further to excite the hos tility of his enemies, and in a lent sermon preached against the &quot; sacramentaries &quot; before the king, special reference was made to some at that time in the Tower, &quot; so bold as to write in defence of that heresy,&quot; and who seemed to be put there &quot;rather for safeguard than for punishment.&quot; On thij instigation, Henry ordered that Frith should be examined ; the result of a regular trial which followed was that he was found guilty of having denied, with regard to the doctrines of purgatory and of transubstantiation, that they were necessary articles of faith. On the 23d of June 1533 he was handed over to the secular arm, and at Smith- field on the 4th of July following he was burnt at the stake. During his captivity he had been more than usually busy with his pen, and his writings belonging to this period in clude, besides several letters of interest, a controversial work on the eucharist in reply to what Sir T. More had written against Frith s &quot;lytle treatise&quot;; also two tracts en titled respectively A Mirror or Glass to know thyself, and A Mirror or Looking-glass wherein you may behold the Sacrament of Baptism. Apart from his ability, which seems to have been regarded by all his contemporaries as extra ordinary, his Acquirements, his piety, his early and tragic death, Frith is an interesting and so far important figure in English ecclesiastical history as having been the first to maintain and defend that doctrine regarding the sacrament of Christ s body and blood which ultimately came to be incorporated in the English communion office. Twenty- throe years after Frith s death as a martyr to the doctrine of that office, that &quot; Christ s natural body and blood are in Heaven, not here,&quot; Cranmer, who had been one of his judges, went to the stake for the same belief. Within three years more, it had become the publicly professed taith of the entire English nation. See the Ads mul Monuments of Foxe ; the collected edition of the Works of Tyndal, Frith, and Barnes, by Foxe (1573); The, Works of the English Reformers, edited by Russell, vol. iii. ; British Re formers, vol. viii. ; Fathers of the English Church, vol. i. ; Ander son s Annals of the English Bible, vol. iii. FRITZLAR, a town formerly of Electoral Hesse and now of Prussia, at the head of a circle in the district of Cassel, about 16 miles S.S.W. of Cassel, on the left bank of the Eder, a left-hand sub-tributary of the Weser. It is an old- fashioned place still surrounded with watchtowers, and it possesses a large number of churches, an Ursuline nunnery, and an old Franciscan monastery, now partly used as a Protestant church and partly as a poorhouse. Its inhabi tants, who according to the census of 1875 numbered 2965, are mainly engaged in agriculture, but also manufacture considerable quantities of earthenware. As early as 732 Boniface, the apostle of Germany, established the church of St Peter s and a small Benedictine monastery at Frideslar, &quot;the quiet home&quot; or &quot;abode of peace.&quot; Before long the school connected with the monastery became famous, and among its earlier scholars it numbered Sturm, abbot of Fulda, and Megingoz, bishop of Wurzburg. When Boni face found himself unable to continue the supervision of the society himself, he entrusted the office to Wigbert of Glastonbury, who thus became the first abbot of Fritzlar. In 774 the little settlement was taken and burnt by the Saxons ; but it evidently soon recovered from the blow. For a short time after 786 it was the seat of the bishopric of Buraburg, or Biirberge, which had been founded by Boniface in 741. At the diet of Fritzlar in 919 Henry I. was elected by the Franks and Saxons. In the beginning of the 13th century the village received municipal rights; in 1232 it was captured and burned by the landgrave, Conrad of Thuringia, and his allies; in 1631 it was taken by storm by William of Hesse ; in 1760 it was successfully defended by General Luckner against the French ; and in 1761 it was occupied by the French and unsuccessfully bombarded by the allies. As a principality Fritzlar con tinued subject to the archbishopric of Mainz till 1802, when it was incorporated with Hesse. From 1807 to 1814 it belonged to the kingdom of Westphalia ; and in 1866 it passed with Hesse to Prussia. FRIULT (in Italian, Friuli ; in French, Frioul ; in Ger man, Friaid; and in the local dialect, Furlanei), a district at thehead of the Adriatic,at present divided between Italyand Austria, the Italian portion being included in the province of Udine, and the Austrian comprising the countship of Go rtz and Gradiska and the so-called Idrian district. In the north and east it is occupied by portions of the Julian and Caruian Alps, while the south is an alluvial plain richly watered by the Isonzo, the Tagliamento, and many lesser streams which, although of small volume during the dry season, come down in enormous floods after rain or thaw. The inhabitants known as Furlanians are probably in the main Latinized Celts, largely mingled with Italians on the one hand and Slovenians on the other. They speak a language much more akin to Latin than even Italian ; details about which will be found in Pirona s Attenenze della lingua friulana date per chiosa ad una iscrizione del 1103, Udine, 1859, and Vocabulario friulino, Venice, 1869. Friuli derives its name from the Roman town of Forum Julii, or Forojulium, which is said by Paulus Diaconus to have been founded by Julius Caesar. In the 2d century B.C. the district was subjugated by the Romans, and became part of Gallia Transpadana. During the Roman period, besides Forum Julii, its principal towns were Concordia, Aquileia, Vediuium, and Naeria. On the con quest of the country by the Lombards it was made one of their thirty-six duchies, the capital being Forum Julii or, as they called it, Civitas Austrise. It is needless to re peat the list of dukes of the Lombard line, from Gisulf to