The friars were the popular order of the clergy. The Four Orders were great organizations of itinerant preachers; powerful through their learning and eloquence, their organization, and the Papal support; cultivating the favour of the people by which they lived by popular eloquence and demagogic arts.
Between these two great classes stood the secular clergy, upon whom the practical pastoral work of the country fell. A numerous body, but disorganized; diocesan bishops acting as statesmen, and devolving their ecclesiastical duties on suffragans; rectors refusing to take priests' orders, and living like laymen; the majority of the parishes practically served by parochial chaplains; every gentleman having his own chaplain dependent on his own pleasure; hundreds of priests engaged in secular occupations.
Between the secular priests and the friars, as we have seen, pp. 46 _et seq._, there was a direct rivalry and a great deal of bitter feeling. The friars accused the parish priests of neglect of duty and ignorance in spiritual things and worldliness of life, and came into their parishes whenever they pleased, preaching and visiting from house to house, hearing confessions and prescribing penances, and carrying away the offerings of the people. The parish priests looked upon the friars as intruders in their parishes, and accused them of setting their people against them and undermining their spiritual influence; of corrupting discipline, by receiving the confessions of those who were ashamed to confess to their pastor who knew them, and enjoining light penances in order to encourage people to come to them; and lastly, of using all the arts of low popularity-seeking in order to extract gifts and offerings from their people.
We have already given one contemporary illustration of this from Chaucer, at p. 46 _ante_. We add one or two extracts from Piers Ploughman's Vision. In one place of his elaborate allegory he introduces Wrath, saying:--
"I am Wrath, quod he, I was sum tyme a frere, And the convent's gardyner for to graff impes[280] On limitoures and listers lesyngs I imped Till they bere leaves of low speech lordes to please And sithen thier blossomed abrode in bower to hear shriftes. And now is fallen therof a fruite, that folk have well liever Shewen her shriftes to hem than shryve hem to ther parsones. And now, parsons have perceyved that freres part with hem, These possessioners preache and deprave freres, And freres find hem in default, as folk beareth witness."--v. 143.