Читать книгу The Magnificient Century: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 23

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There has been so much discussion of the looting of England by the hierarchy at Rome, the bitter warring of high churchmen whose shoes “shone with boocles of silver” and whose girdles had silver harneys, and of the excessive wealth of the monasteries that an impression may have been created of spiritual bankruptcy. This is so far from the truth that a hasty amendment seems now to be demanded. The hold of the Church on the hearts and imaginations of the people was deep enough and great enough to bring about one crusade after another and to keep the roads of Christendom filled with pilgrims. It inspired them to the building of the great churches, those wonderful testimonials to richness of faith. It led men by the tens of thousands to devote their lives to contemplation in the abbeys which raised their rooftops everywhere, in secluded vale and on stark moor.

Early in the thirteenth century a magnificent manifestation of this faith was provided by the work of two men, working independently and without knowledge of each other, one in Spain and one in Italy. Out of the efforts of St. Dominic and St. Francis of Assisi came the mendicant friars, the humble preachers who went about on foot, staff in hand, tending to the spiritual and bodily needs of the poorest classes, asking no earthly reward, a field hedge their cloister, a begging bowl their sole possession. The first years of the great century saw at its freshest and finest this fervent striving of man to achieve the purposes of God. As time went on the Dominicans and the Franciscans grew into huge orders. With growth came the inevitable companion, organization, and then, finally, permanence and wealth; but nothing could blur the memory of the glorious start. To the first symbol of the age, which must be the church spire reaching higher and ever higher into the sky, could now be added a second, the humble friar in his brown or white robe of coarsest cloth, his feet bare and scarred, the light of service in his eyes.

Dominicans went out to preach, the Franciscans to serve. The founder of the Franciscans had a conception of selflessness directly opposed to monasticism, which took a man out of the world. It was not their own souls with which the brown friars were concerned; it was the souls of the downtrodden, the leper, the thief, and the doxy. They were sworn to poverty so complete that some of them did not own as much as a breviary. “I am your breviary!” cried Francis to one of his followers. They must own no property; they must give no thought to the morrow. It was a perfect conception but one which, because of its perfection, attracted too many converts; and with growth it changed and became in time something quite different.

The Franciscan order became of great importance in England. It flourished there, growing with more rapidity than elsewhere. After the founder himself, the great men of the order came from England—Adam Marsh, Haymo of Faversham, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham. Above all, there was that fascinating and mysterious figure, Roger Bacon, that bright light in the Dark Ages, that great genius who laid a slow train which smoldered for centuries and then exploded finally into scientific discovery and advance.

The first Franciscans landed in England on September 10, 1224, a party of nine men, only four of whom were in holy orders, under the leadership of Friar Angellus of Pisa. In the party were three Englishmen, Friar Richard of Ingeworth, Friar Richard of Devon, and William of Esseby, a novice. They were received with suspicion at Dover, these unpriestly strangers whose pockets were empty. They were locked up for the night and ejected from the gates of the town early the next morning. Taking then the pilgrimage trail to Canterbury, they stayed for two days of rest and prayer before going on to London to begin their work in accordance with the strictest teachings of the founder, the beloved Poverello: to serve and obey, to be humble and charitable, to perform manual labor and to save neither copper coin nor stalk of lentil against the morrow. They had given away all their worldly possessions when they joined the order, and each owned nothing now but a tunic of patchwork stuff, a pair of breeches, and a cord for the waist.

They began at once to tend the sick in the crowded and poor sections of the city. At first they lived in a small house in Cornhill which had been loaned to them. This they cut up into individual cells, filling the walls with dried grass. Some years later a London mercer gave them a house near Newgate, close to the city slaughter ground and thus in the section generally called Stinking Lane. It was a dwelling of bare plank walls, a proper base for the work to which they were dedicated.

Richard of Ingeworth and Richard of Devon went on to Oxford and obtained a house there in the parish of St. Ebbe. It was their good fortune, therefore, to give the order its first great impetus in England. The university city had been ripe for a spiritual awakening. In the hospitia (the houses where groups of students lived under the stern eye of a principilator) which clustered on School Street were men of fine minds and deep fervor who had been restive and unhappy. They had been studying, probing, seeking, unwilling to bury themselves away from the sins of the world in the easy way of monasticism and yet seeing no other outlet for their zeal. They were men of great learning like the gentle and wise Adam de Marisco, or, as he is better known, Adam Marsh. To men like this the coming of the humble Franciscans was a direct answer. Here, at last, was a way to fight the evil and greed of the world. They began to join in large numbers. While the order continued to spread in all directions Oxford remained the core, the spiritual as well as intellectual center. The King, who was sincerely devout, sent beams from Savernake for the chapel which was being built for them in the university city. Robert Grosseteste, one of the great men of the age, as will become apparent soon, was filling a post which one day would be called chancellor and he acted as rector of the Franciscans. Under his watchful eye the Franciscan school achieved an international reputation. Adam Marsh taught there, and his gentle philosophy supplemented perfectly the teachings of the founder. They now had a choir, not, however, like the resplendent edifices rising all over England; a place of bare walls, as plain as a certain manger in Bethlehem. Some years later the King’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, would build them a church and bury there his third and beautiful wife, Beatrice of Falkenstein.

The order grew so rapidly throughout England that in thirty years it had 49 houses and 1,242 members. Haymo of Faversham had played a large part in its growth and had been instrumental in developing along practical lines the precepts of the founder. He it was who insisted that it was better to gain a living by work than by begging. St. Francis had insisted that his followers subsist on whatever they were given so that all their time could be used in the care of the poor. Haymo’s conception was more practical, a belief that a few hours of labor each day with hoe and mattock, saw and hammer, would suffice to provide the brothers with food and still leave them free in the service of the needy. This was more acceptable to English members. The begging bowl went out of use.

In a still more important respect the order in England grew far away from the original conceptions of the Poverello. Francis had wanted men of small learning, even of an ignorance to match that of the poor people they served. In England the trend was in the other direction. It was men of learning who were attracted to the order, and those who came to the top were the most illustrious scholars of the age. The man chiefly responsible for this was Grosseteste, himself the most vigorous and enlightened of thinkers.