Meanwhile, politics apart, there might yet be found in the fourteenth century some of God’s elect who, alarmed by the crimes of the world and the state of sin in which men lived, left their cells or the paternal roof to go about among villages and towns and preach conversion. There remained some, but they were rare. Contrary to others, these did not speak of public affairs, but of eternal interests; they had not always received sacred orders; they acted as volunteers to the celestial army. Of this sort was the before mentioned Richard Rolle, of Hampole, whose life was partly that of a hermit, partly of a wandering preacher. He was neither monk, nor doctor, nor priest; when young, he had abandoned his father’s house to go and lead a contemplative life in solitude. There he meditated, prayed, and mortified himself; crowds came to his cell to listen to his exhortations; he had ecstatic trances; his friends took off his ragged cloak, mended it, and put it back on his shoulders without his perceiving it. He later left his retreat, and for a long time travelled over the north of England, becoming a wanderer, “changing place continually,” preaching to lead men to salvation. He finally settled at Hampole, where he ended his life in seclusion, writing incessantly, and edifying the neighbourhood by his devotion; he died the year of the great plague, 1349. Scarcely was he dead than his tomb attracted pilgrims, pious people brought offerings there, miracles were performed. In the {291} nuns’ convent at Hampole, which drew from the vicinity of his tomb great honour and profit, an “Office of St. Richard, the hermit,” was composed, as we have seen, to be sung when he should be canonized. But the office of the old hermit and itinerant preacher has never had occasion to be sung down to the present day.[393] The wandering preachers met with in the villages were not always Lollards sent by Wyclif, nor inspired men who, like Rolle of Hampole, held their mission from their conscience and from God; they were often members of an immense and powerful caste sub-divided into several orders, that of the mendicant friars. The two principal branches were the Dominicans, Preachers, or Black friars, and the Franciscans, Friars minor or Grey friars, both established in England in the thirteenth century,[394] the “men of this [world] that most wide walken,” said Langland.[395] The immortal satires of Chaucer should not blind us to the initial merit of these orders, nor cause us to see in the members thereof, at all times, nothing but impudent and idle vagabonds, at once impious, superstitious, and greedy—