§ 39. THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND. 307
own statement, drew400 marks yearly from priests for the privilege of having concubines, a noble, equal in value to a mark, from each one.^ Gower, in his Vox clamantis, gave a dark picture of clerical habits, and charges the clergy with coarse vices such as now are scarcely dreamed of. The Church historian. Capes, concludes that "immorality and negligence were widely spread among the clergy." 2 The decline of discipline among the friars, and their rude manners, a prominent feature of the times, came in for the strictures of Fitzralph of Armagh, severe condemnation at the hands of Wyclif and playful sarcasm from the pen of Chaucer. The zeal for learning which had characterized them on their first arrival in England, early in the 13th century, had given way to self-satisfied idleness. Fitzralph, who was fellow of Balliol, and probably chancellor of the University of Oxford, before being raised to the episcopate, incurred the hostility of the friars by a series of sermons against the Franciscan theory of evangelical poverty. He claimed it was not scriptural nor derived from the customs of the primitive Church. For his temerity he was compelled to answer at Avignon, where he seems to have died about the year 1360.^ Of the four orders of mendicants, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites and Augustinians, Longland sang that
they
Preached the people for profit and themselve
Closed the Gospel as them good lyked,
For covetis of copis construed it as they would.
Of the ecclesiastics of the century, if we except Wyclif, probably the most noted are Thomas Bradwardine and William of Wykeham, the one the representative of scholarly study, the other of ecclesiastical power. Bradwardine, theologian, phi-_
1 Gascoigne, as quoted by Gairdner : Lollardy and the Beform., I. 262.
2 1, p. 253.
8 His Defensio curatorum contra eos qui privilegatos se dicunt is printed in Goldast, II. 406 sqq. See art. Fitzralph, by R. L. Poole, Diet, of Nat. Biog., XIX. 194-198. Four books of Fitzralph's Z>e joawperie salvatoris were printed for the first time by Poole in his ed. of Wyclif's De dominio, pp. 257-477. As for libraries, Fitzralph says that in every English convent there was a grand library. On the other hand, the author of the Philobiblion, Rich, de Bury, charges the friars with losing their interest in books.
308 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
losoBher, mathematician and astronomer, wasj^jtudentat Merton College^jOxfoi-d, 1325. At Avignon, whitherhe^vvenTto receive consecration to the see of Canterbury, 1349, he had a strange experience. During the banquet givenby Clement VI. the doors were thrown open and a clown entered, seated on a jackass, and humbly petitioned the pontiff to be made archbishop of Canterbury. This insult, gotten up by Clement's nephew Hugo, cardinal of Tudela, and other members of the sacred college, was in allusion to the remark made by the pope that, if the king of England would ask him to appoint a jackass to a bishopric, he would not dare to refuse. The sport throws an unpleasant light upon the ideals of the curia, but at the same time bears witness to the attempt which was being made in England to control the appointment of ecclesiastics. Bradwardine enjoyed such an enviable reputation that Wyclif and other English contemporaries gave him the title, the Profound Doctor — doctor profundus.^ In his chief work on grace and free\vTll, delivered as a series of lectures at Merton, he declared that the Church was running after Pelagius.^ In the philosophical schools he had rarely heard anything about grace, but all day long the assertions that we are masters of our own loills. He was a determinist. All things, he affirmed, which occur, occur by the necessity of the first cause. In his Nun's Tale, speaking of God's predestination, Chaucer says : — But he cannot boult it to the breii As can the holie doctour, S. Austin, Or Boece (Boethius), or the Bishop Bradwardine.
W^keham, 1324-1404, the pattern of a worldly and aristocratic prelate, ^vxls,aa.unblushing pluralist, iuul liis see of Wiiichester is said to have brought him in X()0,000 of our money annuully. In l^'dl alone, he received prebends in St. Paul's, Hereford, Salisbury, St. David's, Beverley, Bromyard, Wherwell Abergwili, and Llanddewi Brewi, and in the following
1 Wyclif: De verit. scr., I. 30, 109, etc.
^ De causa Dei contra Pchuiirnn et de virtute caumrnm ad snos Mertinenses, ed. by Sir Henry Saville, London, 1()18. For other works, see Seeberg's art. in Herzog, IIL 350, and Stephens in Diet, of Nat. Biog., VI. 188 sq. Also S. Hahn, Thos. Bi'adwardiutis, und seine Lehre von d. menschl, Willensfreiheit, Miinster, 1905.