The popularity of the friars had soon become immense,[405] {297} and it was found that they had monopolized in England everything that concerned religion.[406] By a quite human contradiction—let Brutus be Cæsar—their poverty had invited riches, and their self-denial power; the hovels where they lodged at first had become sumptuous monasteries with chapels as large as cathedrals; the rich wanted to be buried there, in tombs chiselled with the latest refinements of the florid Gothic. Their apologists of the fifteenth century relate with admiration that in their fine library at London, for in spite of the rule they had a fine library, there was a tomb adorned with four cherubims;[407] that their church, begun in 1306, was three hundred feet long, ninety-five wide, and sixty-four feet high, with the columns all of marble as well as the pavement. Kings and princes had enriched the building; some had given the altars, others the stalls; Edward III, “for the repose of the soul of the most illustrious Queen Isabella, buried in the choir” (who had ended her immoral life in the habit of the Santa Clara nuns), repaired the great middle window, blown down by the wind. In the same church was preserved the heart of Queen Eleanor, mother of Edward I. Relating that it was there, Rishanger, a monk of Saint Albans and a contemporary, made thereupon a remark, which Walsingham, also a monk of St. Albans, gleefully reproduced in his “Historia Anglicana”: “Her body was buried in the monastery of Ambresbury, but her heart in London, in the church of the Minorites, who, like all friars of every order, claim for themselves something of the bodies of any powerful persons dying; after the manner of the dogs assembling {298} round corpses, where each one greedily awaits his portion to devour.”[408] Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, had given for the same building twenty trees from his forest of Tunbridge. Rich merchants, the mayor, the aldermen, followed suit. The names of the donors were inscribed on the windows, and Langland was indignant, and recalled the precept, “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” We learn thus that the third window on the west had been given by Walter Mordon, “stoke-fyschmonger,” and Mayor of London. The second window on the south was due to John of Charlton, knight, and his wife, whose arms figured in it; the fourth to Walter de Gorst, fellmonger of London; the fifth to the Earl of Lancaster; the fourth on the west to “various collections, and thus it does not bear a name.” One of the donors is styled the special father and friend of the friars minor. It could be but a delight for the Wyclifites to reproach the friars with all these mundane splendours; Wyclif revels in it: “Freris bylden mony grete chirchis and costily waste housis, and cloystris as hit were castels, and that withoute nede. . . . Grete housis make not men holy, and onely by holynesse is God wel served.” Those convents are “Caymes Castelis.”[409]