Note 40 — Chapter I · THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Confraternities and friars “of the Sack,” known as Sacconi in their birthplace, Italy, and so called because of the loose gown or ‘sack’ common to begging friars and confraternities, and also because of the large sacks which they sometimes carried when begging for the poor, were associations due to the preaching of S. Francis and especially of S. Antony of Padua in the first quarter of the xiii c. So that the Cambridge friars, dispersed after the Council of Lyons in 1307, were one of the earliest of these communities; and it is interesting to find them addicted to scholarship.