The greatest enemies of the mendicant were the parish priest and the monk. The former found himself abandoned; no one confessed to him; no one listened to him. They were all running after the mendicant friar, who spoke to them in their own patois, was one of themselves, who knew their ways and their wants, and confessed them easily. And Jack Straw’s rebellion showed what had been the teaching of these wanderers. Since there were so many of them that alms were not always to be obtained, some, as we have seen, became pedlars:— “They wandren here and there, And dele with divers marcerye, Right as thai pedlers were, That dele with purses, pinnes and knyves, With gyrdles, gloves, for wenches and wyves.” Walsingham, a monk of St. Alban’s, says of them, “The friars, unmindful of their profession, have even forgotten to what end their Orders were instituted; for the holy men their law-givers desired them to be poor and free of all kinds of temporal possessions, that they should not have anything which they might fear to lose on account of saying the truth. But now they are envious of possessions, approve the crimes of the great, induce the commonalty into error, and praise the sins of both: and with the intent of acquiring possessions ... call good evil and evil good.” And a popular song of the fourteenth century says of them:— “Full wisely can they preach and say; But as thei preche no thing do thei, I was a frere ful many a day, Therefore the sothe I wate. But when I saw that thair lyvyng Accordyd not to thair preching, Of I cast my frer clothing, And nyghtly went my gate. Other leve ne took I none Fro ham where I went. But took ham to the devil ye none The prior and the convent.” [Illustration: A PRIEST CALLED JOHN BALL STIRS UP GREAT COMMOTION IN ENGLAND From Froissart’s _Chronicles_.] And see _Political Songs_, Edw. III.—Rich. III. vol. ii. p. 17, edited by Thomas Wright:— “But the felliest folke that ever Antichrist found, been last brought into the church, and in a woonder wise; for they been of diverse sects of Antichrist, sown of diverse countries and kindreds. And all men knowne well that they bee not obedient to bishops, ne leege men to kings; neither they tillen ne sowen, weeden ne reapen, wood, corn, ne grasse, neither nothing that man should helpe, but onely themselves, their lives to susteine, And these men have all manner power of God, as they seyn, in heaven and in yearth, to sell heaven and hell to whom that them liketh; and these wretches weet never where to been themselves. And therefore, freer, if thine order and rules been grounded on Goddis law, tell thou mee, Jacke Upland, that I aske of thee, and if thou be or thinkest to be on Christes side, keepe thy paciens.” And these are the questions asked of the Friar:—