Note 331 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The history of the Franciscans in particular is like that of the Church in general—one of rapid lapse into furious schism, with a general reversion to gross self-seeking on the part of the majority, originally vowed to utter poverty. Elias, the first successor of Francis, appointed by the Saint himself, proved an intolerable tyrant; and in his day began the ferocious strife between the “Spirituals,” who insisted on the founder’s ideal of poverty, and the majority, who insisted on accepting the wealth which the world either bestowed or could be cajoled into bestowing on the order. The majority, of course, ultimately overbore the Spirituals, the papacy supporting them.331 They followed the practically universal law of monastic life. The Humiliati, founded before the thirteenth century, had to be suppressed by the Pope in the sixteenth, for sheer corruption of morals; and the Franciscans and Dominicans, who speedily became bitterly hostile to each other, were in large measure little better. Even in the middle of the thirteenth century they were attacked by the Sorbonne doctor, William of St. Amour, in a book on The Perils of the Latter Times;332 and in England in the fourteenth century we find Wiclif assailing the begging friars as the earlier satirists had assailed the abbots and monks. That all this reciprocal invective was not mere partizan calumny, but broadly true as against both sides, is the conclusion forced upon a reader of the Philobiblon ascribed to Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and Treasurer and Chancellor under Edward III. In that book, written either by the bishop or by one of his chaplains, Robert Holkot,333 the demerits of all orders of the clergy from the points of view of letters and morals are set forth with impartial emphasis;334 and the character of the bishop in turn is no less effectively disposed of after his death by Adam Murimuth, a distinguished lawyer and canon of St. Paul’s.335