The pride and luxury of the Friars, their splendid buildings, their laxity in the Confessional, their artifices for securing proselytes, their continual strife with the University and their endeavours to obtain peculiar privileges therein had long undermined their popularity. They were regarded as "locusts" who had settled on the land and stripped the trees of learning and of life. Duns Scotus held almost undisputed sway for a while. His works on logic, theology and philosophy were text-books in the University. But presently there arose a new light, a pupil of his own, to supplant him. William of Ockham, the "singular" or "invincible" doctor, revived the doctrine of Nominalism. At once the glory and reproach of his Order, he used the weapons of Scholasticism to destroy it. But if in Philosophy the "invincible doctor" was a sceptic, in Theology he was a fanatical supporter of the extreme Franciscan view that the ministers of Christ were bound to follow the example of their Master, and to impose upon themselves absolute poverty. It was a view which found no favour with popes or councils. But undeterred by the thunders of the Church, Ockham did not shrink from thus attacking the foundations of the papal supremacy or from asserting the rights of the civil power. Paris had been, as we have seen, the first home of Scholasticism, but with the beginning of the fourteenth century, Oxford had taken its place as the centre of intellectual activity in Europe. The most important schoolmen of the age were all Oxonians, and nearly all the later schoolmen of note were Englishmen or Germans educated in the traditions of the English "nation" at Paris. And when the old battle between Nominalism and Realism was renewed, it was fought with more unphilosophical virulence than before. "It was at this time that Philosophy literally descended from the schools into the street, and that the _odium metaphysicum_ gave fresh zest to the unending faction fight between north and south at Oxford, between Czech and German at Prague" (Rashdall). Yet this was not without good results. For Scholasticism began now to come in contact with practical life. The disputants were led on to deal with the burning questions of the day, the questions, that is, as to the foundations of property, the respective rights of king and pope, of king and subject, of priest and people. The day was now at hand when the trend of political events, stimulated by the influence of the daring philosophical speculations of the Oxford schoolmen, was to issue in a crisis. The crisis was a conflict between the claims of papal supremacy and the rights of the civil power, and for this crisis Oxford produced the man--John Wycliffe.