Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/82

 to Rome, and helped to weld a France which to this day, in spite of republican institutions and widespread rationalism, is not so much the eldest son as the most jealous guardian of the Roman Church. And in England, though his Inquisition was powerless, and he had to wait nearly two hundred years for the attainment of his ambition, it was still St. Dominic and his Preaching Friars who turned the blade of Wyclif's logic, diverted the full flood of Lollardy until it was lost for a century in the sands, instigated a persecution almost as bitter as that which had been directed against the Waldenses, and for a time baulked and defeated the intellectual movement in the English Church.

The coming of the Franciscan (Grey) Friars, or Friars Minor, to Oxford took place in the year 1224. Their arrival in England was only a few years later than that of the Dominicans, as the institution of their Order was a few years subsequent to the establishment of the Preaching Friars. The quaint story of Ingeworth and Henry of Devon, as recorded in Stevens's transcript from the papers of Anthony a Wood, is well worth telling afresh.

These two forerunners of a famous brotherhood, "being not far from Oxford, and gone out of the way as not knowing the country," turned off to a grange or farm-house of the Benedictines of Abingdon, six miles from Oxford, because night was drawing on and the floods were out. Stevens suggests that the precise locality may have been Baldon, or Culham, for at both places the Abbey of Abingdon had property. "The friers came to it just at