7. =The Coming of the Friars. 1220-1224.=--In =1220= the first Dominicans arrived in England. Four years later, in =1224=, the first Franciscans followed them. Of the work of the early Dominicans in England little is known. They preached and taught, appealing to those whose intelligence was keen enough to appreciate the value of argument. The Franciscans had a different work before them. The misery of the dwellers on the outskirts of English towns was appalling. The townsmen had made provision for keeping good order amongst all who shared in the liberties,[13] or, as we should say, in the privileges of the town; but they made no provision for good order amongst the crowds who flocked to the town to pick up a scanty living as best they might. These poor wretches had to dwell in miserable hovels outside the walls by the side of fetid ditches into which the filth of the town was poured. Disease and starvation thinned their numbers. No man cared for their bodies or their souls. The priests who served in the churches within the town passed them by, nor had they any place in the charities with which the brethren of the gilds assuaged the misfortunes of their own members. It was amongst these that the Franciscans lived and laboured, sharing in their misery and their diseases, counting their lives well spent if they could bring comfort to a single human soul. [Footnote 13: A phrase which may serve to keep in mind the medieval meaning of '_libertas_' is to be found in the statement that a certain monastery kept up a pair of stocks '_pro libertate servanda_'--that is to say, to keep up its franchise of putting offenders into the stocks.] 8. =Monks and Friars.=--The work of the friars was a new phase in the history of the Church. The monks had made it their object to save their own souls; the friars made it their object to save the bodies and souls of others. The friars, like the monks, taught by the example of self-denial; but the friars added active well-doing to the passive virtue of restraint. Such examples could not fail to be attended with consequences of which those who set them never dreamed, all the more because the two new orders worked harmoniously towards a common end. The Dominicans quickened the brain whilst the Franciscans touched the heart, and the whole nation was the better in consequence. [Illustration: Longthorpe Manor House, Northampton; built about 1235. Some of the larger windows are later.]