ABSTRACT
While the activities of the friars were greatest among the depressed classes in the poorer quarters and on the edges of large cities, there were few localities that did not come under their influence. So great was the stress which they laid upon preaching that they even curtailed the rest of the service to save more time for the sermon. It was their method of bringing home the teachings of Christ and enforcing his precepts with the vividness of direct speech. Some friars traveled from place to place, preaching in parish
Ignorance among the Lower Clergy
The Coming of the Friars
Their Emphasis on Preaching
churches, the churchyard, the market-place, and the crossroads; others preached regularly in their own churches-which in the course of time they establishedon Sundays and festivals and on rainy days, when, as Pecock tells us, great numbers were wont to come to the friars’ churches.2 One reason for their popularity was their concern with basic social and moral questions. Another was undoubtedly the skill with which they adapted themselves to their audience, generously sprinkling their discourse with anecdote and illustration and even adopting devices learned from the minstrels. There is little doubt that they sometimes preached in verse. Wyclif accuses them of corrupting the word of God, “some by riming and others by preaching poems and fables.” 3
The success of the friars was naturally a shock to the regular clergy, arousing bitterness in some but warm admiration in others. It is not necessary to suppose that nothing would ever have been done for the people without the stimulus of the mendicants,4 but the action soon to be taken may well have owed something to the example of the friars. Robert Grosseteste, lecturer to the Franciscans at Oxford and one who, though not belonging to the order himself, expressed the desire to have about him at all times members of the order, issued a set of Constitutions shortly after he became Bishop of Lincoln, requiring the clergy in his diocese to know and to teach the people in their mother tongue the Decalogue, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Sacraments, and the Creed. A few years later his example was followed by the Bishop of Worcester,5 while in 1246 the Bishop of Chichester set up a similar though simpler requirement that the laity be taught the Paternoster, Creed, and Ave. These efforts toward reform were inspired by the activities of Innocent III and the decrees of the fourth Lateran Council (1215-16), soon reaffirmed by the Council of Oxford called by Stephen Langton in 1222. But the injunctions of individual bishops were of direct force only in their own dioceses. In 1281 a regulation of national scope was
Their Influence
adopted. John Peckham, a Franciscan friar, almost immediately upon becoming Archbishop of Canterbury called a general council at Lambeth and issued the famous Constitutions of Lambeth. They begin with a preamble which asserts that “the ignorance of priests casts the people into the pit of error” and then proceeds:
A series of paragraphs on the topics mentioned carries out the promise of the last sentence. Peckham’s Constitutions were constantly referred to for upwards of two hundred years and were followed by a succession of pronouncements from bishops in various parts of England reaffirming them in spirit and often in identical words.6 They remained the authoritative outline of doctrine upon which the people were supposed to be instructed until the end of the Middle Ages.
