Question 1
Evaluate the interpretations in both of the two passages and explain which you think is more
convincing as an explanation of the impact of the Mendicant Orders on the towns.
Passage A
The spread of the friars throughout Europe was the most important religious phenomenon of the thirteenth century. To support the friars was to support the poor. Even more important, however, was the way in which the friars served the needs of a new and changing society. Served, that is, an educated laity who, through penance and other forms of piety, were working out their own salvation in the world. For this new audience preachers were essential and so were effective confessors. The Fourth Lateran Council told bishops to place men in cathedrals and conventual churches (usually in major towns) to do, “everything for the saving of souls”. The Council might well have been drawing up a job description for the friars. The demand, especially in the towns, for a more personal and intellectual religion had already generated movements in France and Italy. The friars shared certain characteristics with these movements. They channelled towards orthodoxy spiritual aspirations which might otherwise have strayed towards heresy, and were a major force in combating heresy in Europe and preventing its appearance in Britain. Their message was in no way simplistic, an important feature given the audience. Townsmen, knights and academics rushed to join the orders. Houses were usually given by townsmen themselves. The friars had a profound impact on the spiritual life of towns.
Adapted from: D. Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: Britain, 1066–1284, published in 2003.
Passage B
In the thirteenth century St. Francis’ example of apostolic poverty had caught the imagination of a whole age, and in their ministrations to the laity the friars had been the shock troops of spiritual revival. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries their initial zeal had cooled, and they had become part of the ecclesiastical establishment. They were very numerous. Their town churches were large, sometimes including guest chambers. They were confessors to the great. They had also begun to attract some of the fiercest of all the criticism that was levelled by contemporaries at the clergy. The set themes of anti-mendicant satire recur over and again in the literature of the late middle ages. There are too many friars. They abuse their privileges; their begging is insistent; their morals are loose. It was natural that the friars should attract hostile attention. Because their orders were not enclosed and they wandered at large in the world, their wrongdoings were all too visible. They really were too numerous for their own good, and attracted too many whose vocations were not strong. Their ministrations could complicate relations between parish clergy and their flocks and the fact that they were responsible to their own orders and not to the bishops could be more than just administratively inconvenient.
Adapted from: M. Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages:1348–1500, published in 1990.
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Answer
