Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/86

 laxity by the new devotees, but also to the harmonious relations existing at the time between the followers of Dominic and those of Francis of Assisi.

It need hardly be said that the harmony and co-operation of the friars in matters of common interest was no sign of identity in their mandates, vows, or ultimate aims. Most of the brotherhoods originating in the thirteenth century seem to have owed their institution to the revival of religious fervour by the crusades or otherwise, and to a spirit of moral innovation due to the plethoric abuses of many Benedictine houses. It is not clear that any other Order had the subtlety of purpose which undoubtedly belonged to the Dominicans, though many of the Franciscans were evidently made of the same stuff, and were equally intellectual and highly-trained men. It is told of Francis—whose youth was dissolute and profligate—that when he elected to follow an ascetic life his father required him to make a formal renunciation of his inheritance, and that he thereupon stripped himself naked, in order that the symbol might be beyond dispute. And it is further stated that in the course of a few years he had as many as five thousand friars at his disposal, who had been moved by his example to similar acts of renunciation. In any case it is certain that the Dominicans and Franciscans were, and continued to be recruited by, picked men, socially and intellectually on a level with the men whom they would meet at Oxford and Cambridge. And of course they would not be long in England before the main body of their members were drawn from the