The friars kept their assurance, they were blessed in the days of their good deeds; now they speak loud and make themselves feared; to the Pope alone they are amenable; they carry their heads high, their power is independent, they have become a church within the Church. Along with the priest who preaches and confesses in his parish is to be seen the wandering friar, who preaches and confesses everywhere; his universal presence and power are sources of conflict; the parish priest finds himself abandoned; the religious wayfarer brings the unknown, the extraordinary, and everybody runs to him. He lays down his staff and wallet and begins to talk; his language is that of the people, the whole parish is present; he busies himself with their eternal welfare, and also with their earthly interests, for lay life is familiar to him, and he can give appropriate advice. But his teaching is sometimes suspicious. “These false prophets,” says not Wyclif, but the Council of Saltzburg in 1386, “by their sermons full of fables often lead astray the souls of their hearers”; they make game of the authority of the parish priests.[422] To stop their progress proved impossible. The tide rose and swept away the embankments; the excellent had become the worst, _corruptio optimi pessima_, and the old adage was verified to the letter. In spite of grievances, protests, derisive songs and stories, they were met everywhere, in the hut and in the castle, begging from the rich {307} and knocking also at the door of the poor. They sat at the board of the noble, who treated them with consideration; with him they played the part of the fashionable man of religion; they interested, they pleased. Wyclif shows them creeping into familiarity with the great, liking “to speke bifore lordis and sitte at tho mete with hom, . . . also to be confessoures of lordis and ladyes.”[423] Langland, in “Piers Plowman,” is equally severe on “frere Flaterere.” In a Wyclifite treatise of the same period we read, “Thei geten hem worldly offis in lordis courtis, and summe to ben conseilours and reuleris of werris, and also to ben chamberleyns to lordes and ladies.”[424] Courting popularity among all people, they were different men and acted differently in the villages where they made their rounds; to their wallet they added store of thread, needles, ointments, with which they traded: “Thei becomen pedleris, berynge knyves, pursis, pynnys and girdlis and spices and sylk and precious pellure and forrouris for wymmen, and therto smale gentil hondis (dogs), to gete love of hem.”[425] They were more and more the subject of song and cause of mirth, but they did not mind, being the better advertised thereby: “Thai wandren here and there, And dele with dyvers marcerye, Right as thai pedlers were. Thai dele with purses, pynnes, and knyves, With gyrdles, gloves, for whenches and wyves.”[426] {308} The anonymous author, a contemporary of Chaucer, adds: