ale
of benefices, from investitures, from the transfer of sees, from the
bestowal of rings and crosiers (badges of episcopal authority), from the
confirmation of elections, and other taxes, irritated sovereigns, and
called out the severest denunciation of statesmen.

Closely connected with papal exactions was the enormous increase of the
Mendicant friars, especially the Dominicans and Franciscans, who had
been instituted by Innocent III. to uphold the papal domination. These
itinerating beggars in their black-and-gray gowns infested every town
and village in England. For a century after their institution, they were
the ablest and perhaps the best soldiers of the Pope, and did what the
Jesuits afterwards performed, and perhaps the Methodists a hundred
years ago,--gained the hearts of the people and stimulated religious
life; but in the fourteenth century they were a nuisance. They sold
indulgences, they invented pious frauds, they were covetous under
pretence of poverty, they had become luxurious in their lives, they
slandered the regular clergy, they usurped the prerogatives of parish
priests, they enriched their convents, they accommodated themselves to
the wishes of the great, and were marked by those peculiarities of which
the Jesuits were accused in the time of Pascal. As they had not in
England, as in Spain and Italy, tribunals of inquisition, they were
ridiculed, despised, and hated, rather than feared. One gets the truest
impression of the popular estimate of these friars from the sarcasms of
Chaucer. The Friar Tuck whom Sir Walter Scott has painted was a very
different man from the Dominicans or the Franciscans of the thirteenth
century, when they reigned in the universities, and were the confessors
of monarchs and the most popular preachers of their time. In the
fourteenth century they were consumed with jealousies and rivalries and
animosities against each other; and all the various orders,--Dominican,
Franciscan, Carmelite,--in spite of their professions of poverty, were
the possessors of magnificent monasteries, and fattened on the credulity
of the world. Besides these Mendicant friars, England was dotted with
convents and religious houses belonging to the different orders of
Benedictines, which, though enormously rich, devoured the substance of
the poor. There were more than twenty thousand monks in a population of
three or four millions; and most of them led idle and dissolute lives,
and were subjects of p