Towards the end of King João's reign a man named João Vicente, noting the corruption into which the religious orders were falling, determined to do what he could by preaching and example to bring back a better state of things. He first began his work in Lisbon, but was driven from there by the bishop to find a refuge at Braga. There he so impressed the archbishop that he was given the decayed and ruined monastery of Villar de Frades in 1425. Soon he had gathered round him a considerable body of followers, to whom he gave a set of rules and who, after receiving the papal sanction, were known as the Canons Secular of St. John the Evangelist or, popularly, Loyos, because their first settlement in Lisbon was in a monastery formerly dedicated to St. Eloy. The church at Villar, which is of considerable size, was probably long of building, as the elliptical-headed west door with its naturalistic treelike posts has details which did not become common till at least the very end of the century. Inside the church consists of a nave of five bays, flanked with chapels but not aisles, transepts which are really only enlarged chapels, and a chancel like the nave but without chapels. The chief feature of the inside is the very elaborate vaulting, which with the number and intricacy of its ribs, is not at all unlike an English Perpendicular vault, and indeed would need but little change to develop into a fan vault. Here then there has been a considerable advance from the imperfect vaulting of the central aisle at Batalha, where the diagonal ribs had to be squeezed in wherever they could go, although there are at Villar no side aisles so that the construction of supporting buttresses was of course easier than at Batalha: and it is well worth noticing how from so imperfect a beginning as the nave at Batalha the Portuguese masters soon learned to build elaborate and even wide vaults, without, as a rule, covering them with innumerable and meaningless twisting ribs as was usually done in Spain. In the north-westernmost chapel stands the font, an elaborate work of the early renaissance; an octagonal bowl with twisted sides resting on a short twisted base. [Sidenote: Matriz, Alvito.]