Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/71

 Let us begin by recalling to memory the more notable monastic Orders of the Christian Church, and especially their institutions and representatives in England, as they existed during the Reformation epoch—an epoch, be it always borne in mind, by no means coincident with the reigns of a few Tudor monarchs, but inaugurated by the intellectual courage of the Schoolmen, prepared by the combative independence of the Plantagenet kings, and merely arriving at its crisis in the sixteenth century.

Seven hundred years divided St. Benedict and his sister Scholastica from the Spaniard Dominic and the Italian Francis of Assisi, who founded the two Orders of Preaching and Begging Friars. The vows of the Benedictine monks bound the members of this Order to self-abnegation, chastity, and other virtues, and the guiding idea of the founder seems to have been that of refuge from the vices, troubles, and distractions of the world. The Cistercians, Carthusians, and other monastic bodies which had been established between the years 900 and 1200 were governed in the main by Benedict's rules, and may be regarded as Benedictines themselves. Ecclesiastical writers have claimed for the same Order no fewer than forty popes, two hundred cardinals, and something like five thousand archbishops and bishops. From the earliest systematic introduction of Christianity into England the Benedictines played an active part in the conversion of the people. They accumulated vast wealth, and secured for themselves a strong vantage-ground by the establishment of abbeys and monasteries. Comprised within the