Ockham, however, the clever Oxford Franciscan, who formed one of the group of pamphleteers that defended Louis of Bavaria against Pope John XXII, quite clearly enlarged the grounds for Church disendowment so as to include the taking over by the State of all individual property. He was a thinker whose theories were strangely compounded of absolutism and democracy. The Emperor was to be supported because his autocracy came from the people. Hence, when Ockham is arguing about ecclesiastical wealth, and the way in which it could be quite fairly confiscated by the Government, he enters into a discussion about the origin of the imperial dignity. This, he declares, was deliberately handed over by the people to the Emperor. To escape making the Pope the original donor of the imperial title, Ockham concedes that privilege to the people. It was they, the people, who had handed over to the Caesars of the Holy Roman Empire all their own rights and powers. Hence Louis was a monarch whose absolutism rested on a popular basis. Then he proceeds in his argument to say that the human positive law by which private property was introduced was made by the people themselves, and that the right or power by which this was done was transferred by them to the Emperor along with the imperial dignity. Louis, therefore, had the same right to undo what they had done, for in him all their powers now resided. This, of course, formed an excellent principle from which to argue to his right to dispossess the Church of its superfluous wealth--indeed of all its wealth. But it could prove equally effectual against the holding by the individual of any property whatever. It made, in effect, private ownership rest on the will of the prince. Curiously, too, in quite another direction the same form of argument had been already worked out by Nicole Oresme, a famous Bishop of Lisieux, who first translated into French the _Politics_ of Aristotle, and who helped so largely in the reforms of Charles V of France. His great work was in connection with the revision of the coinage, on which he composed a celebrated treatise. He held that the change of the value of money, either by its deliberate depreciation, or by its being brought back to its earlier standard of face value, carried such widespread consequences that the people should most certainly be consulted on it. It was not fair to them to take such a step without their willing co-operation. Yet he admits fully that, though this is the wiser and juster way of acting, there was no absolute need for so doing, since all possession and all property sprang from the King. And this last conclusion was advocated by his rival, Philip de Meziers, whose advice Charles ultimately followed. Philip taught that the king was sole judge of whatever was for public use.