Chapter 4: Wycliffe’s Battle with the Mendicant Friars
CHAPTER 4
Wycliffe’s Battle with the Mendicant Friars
“Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks?” ~Ezekiel 34:2
THE RESISTANCE OF EDWARD III AND his parliament to the papacy without had not suppressed the papacy within. Monasteries abounded. In too many instances they were the abodes of corruption.
While precluded by their vow of poverty from holding any property as individuals, the monks were permitted as corporate bodies to possess themselves of all the wealth they could acquire. Lands, houses, hunting grounds, and forests; with the tithings of tolls, orchards, fisheries, kine, wool, and cloth, formed the dowry of the monastery. Curious furniture adorned its apartments; dainty apparel clothed its inmates; the choice treasures of the field, the tree, and the river, covered their tables, while soft paced mules carried them by day, and luxurious couches bore them at night. Their head, the abbot, equaled princes in wealth and surpassed them in pride.
Gross irregularities frequently prevailed, and as early as the end of the twelfth century so many disorders existed that the whole credit of the papal hierarchy was shaken.
Besides the regular clergy and monks, the country was overrun by mendicants, or begging friars; orders instituted early in the thirteenth century. The Franciscans and Dominicans, as these orders were called, after their founders, St. Francis and St. Dominic, professed absolute poverty. They lived by begging.
Clad in gowns of coarse woolen cloth, girded with cord or sash, and provided with capacious pockets, they traversed the land, preaching ridiculous fables and stories to all who were willing to listen, and soliciting alms from the faithful. They were emphatically the soldiers of the Pope, marching through Christendom in two bands, but forming one united army.
The Dominicans were divided into two companies: the one went forward to convert heretics, the other, by the terrible power of the inquisition, to slay them. More rapidly than the older orders did these become corrupt, and only about forty years after their institution, Matthew Paris, a contemporary writer, exclaimed, “It is an awful presage that in 300 years, nay in 400 years and more, the old monastic orders have not so entirely degenerated as these fraternities.”
The Dominicans first entered England in 1321. They speedily multiplied and spread over the kingdom. Forty-three houses belonging to their order were established, and from their black cloak and hood they became popularly known as the “Black Friars.”
The Franciscans by pious frauds endeavored to monopolize the wealth of the country. “Every year,” they said, “St. Francis descends from heaven to purgatory and delivers the souls of all those who were buried in the dress of his order.” Numbers assumed his garb in consequence.
These friars used to kidnap children and shut them up in monasteries. Their practices at the universities were so bad that Fitzralph—Chancellor of Oxford in 1333, and Archbishop of Armagh in 1347—affirmed before the Pope “that parents seeing their children to be stolen from them in the universities by these friars do refuse therefore to send them to their studies.” He also stated, “Whereas in my time there were in the University of Oxford 30,000 students, now there are not to be found 6000.” Fitzralph made a special journey to Avignon, where the Pope then resided, and urged his complaints against the mendicants in person; but although they were but too well founded, the Pope took no notice of them, finding the friars indispensable to him, and knowing that they were his most useful agents.
Fitzralph returned to England, and died three years afterwards in 1360.
Some obscurity exists as to the date when Wycliffe commenced his attack upon the mendicant friars. The general opinion may be expressed in the words of an anonymous writer, whose manuscript is still extant. He says: “John Wycliffe, the singular ornament of his time, began at Oxford in the year of our Lord 1360, in his public lectures, to correct the abuses of the clergy and their open wickedness, King Edward III being living, and continued secure a most valiant champion of the truth against the tyrants of Sodom.”
Subsequent investigations, however, lead to the conclusion that the conflict was not entered upon until a later date, probably as late as the year 1378, and it continued until the reformer’s death. The evils with which Wycliffe charged the mendicants were summarized and published in his tract entitled “Objections to Friars.” This was issued about 1382. In it Wycliffe accused them of “holding fifty heresies and errors, and many more if men would seek them well out.”
Among the fifty heresies and errors laid to their charge were the following:
“Friars say that their religion is more perfect than the religion of Christ, and that it is more meritorious to give alms to hypocrites, that say they are holy and needy when they are strong in body and have overmuch riches, than to give them to poor, feeble, crooked, blind, and bed-ridden men.”
“Friars draw children to their private order by hypocrisy, lying, and stealing.”
“Friars, that be called Masters of Divinity, live as lords and kings, and send out idiots, full of covetousness, to preach, not the Gospel, but chronicles, fables, and lies; to please the people, and to rob them.”
“Friars deal not faithfully in showing people their sins, but flatter them and nourish them in sin.”
In reference to this Fitzralph declared: “I have in my diocese of Armagh about 2000 persons who stand condemned by the censures of the Church denounced every year against murderers, thieves, and such-like malefactors, of all which number scarce fourteen have applied to me, or to my clergy, for absolution; yet they all receive the sacraments, as others do, because they are absolved, or pretend to be absolved, by friars.”
Wycliffe continued:
“Friars praise more their rotten habit than the body of the Lord Jesus Christ; for they teach lords and ladies that if they die in the habit of St. Francis they shall never go to hell.”
He also accused them of making the land lawless, of being Iscariot’s children, betraying the truth of the Gospel for money, of maintaining that Holy Scripture is false, of exalting themselves above Christ, of being guilty of simony, and of cruelly persecuting, even unto death, those who, not of their order, traveled the country sowing God’s Word among the people.
Besides these charges, he held them up to reprobation, declaring:
“Friars are most perilous enemies of the Church and of the land; they hinder curates of their offices and spend needlessly 60,000 marks a year which they rob the poor people of.” And again: “Friars build many churches, and costly waste houses, and cloisters, as it were castles, and that without need, whereby parish churches and common ways have been impaired and in some cases undone.”
While laying bare the vices of the mendicants, Wycliffe also preached the Gospel to his countrymen. The friars claimed, in the name of the Pope, to grant men pardon for their sins. The fallacy of this claim he exposed, but, at the same time, he pointed them to Him who alone could grant pardon for sin. “There cometh,” said he, “no pardon but of God. There is no greater heresy than for a man to believe that he is absolved from his sins if he give money, or if a priest lay his hand upon his head and say that he absolveth thee; for thou must be sorrowful in thy heart and make amends to God, else God absolveth thee not.”
“May God of His infinite mercy,” said he, “destroy the pride, covetousness, hypocrisy, and heresy of this feigned pardoning, and make men busy to keep His commandments, and to set fully their trust in Jesus Christ.”
In thus opposing the begging friars, the reformer ran great hazard. Their power was immense. For nearly two centuries the inquisition had been performing its work of torture and destruction on the Continent. During that period its odious business had devolved chiefly upon the orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis, and these, while appealing to the rack and to the stake as their ultimate weapons of debate, are described as “the confessors, the preachers, and the rulers commonly of all men.”
But while the danger was great, the good that resulted from this controversy was also great. The mendicants pleaded the sanction of the Savior for their begging. “Christ and His apostles,” said they, “were mendicants and lived on alms.” Men turned to the New Testament to see if it were so, and thus became more deeply acquainted with the Word of God. Wycliffe, especially, was led to a yet closer study of the Bible. The truths of Scripture were revealed to him more and more plainly, and he was led to see how widely the Church of Rome had departed from the Gospel of Christ. The preparation for his great work was nearly complete, and, ere long, the Professor of Oxford will give place to the Reformer of England.
Shall I, for fear of feeble man,
The Spirit’s course in me restrain?
Or, undismayed in deed and word,
Be a true witness for my Lord?
My life, my blood, I here present,
If for Thy truth they may be spent:
Fulfill Thy sovereign counsel, Lord!
Thy will be done, Thy name adored!
Give me Thy strength, O God of Power!
Then let winds blow, or thunders roar,
Thy faithful witness will I be;
‘Tis fixed; I can do all through Thee.