Both these reformers took great pains to fit their followers for the office of preachers and teachers, sending them in large numbers to the universities, and founding colleges there for the reception of their students. With an admirable largeness of view, they did not confine their studies to theology, but cultivated the whole range of Science and Art, and so successful were they, that in a short time the professional chairs of the universities of Europe were almost monopolised by the learned members of the mendicant orders.[18] The constitutions required that no one should be licensed as a general preacher until he had studied theology for three years; then a provincial or general chapter examined into his character and learning; and, if these were satisfactory, gave him his commission, either limiting his ministry to a certain district (whence he was called in English a _limitour_, like Chaucer's Friar Hubert), or allowing him to exercise it where he listed (when he was called a _lister_). This authority to preach, and exercise other spiritual functions, necessarily brought the friars into collision with the parochial clergy;[19] and while a learned and good friar would do much good in parishes which were cursed with an ignorant, or slothful, or wicked pastor, on the other hand, the inferior class of friars are accused of abusing their position by setting the people against their pastors whose pulpits they usurped, and interfering injuriously with the discipline of the parishes into which they intruded. For it was not very long before the primitive purity and zeal of the mendicant orders began to deteriorate. This was inevitable; zeal and goodness cannot be perpetuated by a system; all human societies of superior pretensions gradually deteriorate, even as the Apostolic Church itself did. But there were peculiar circumstances in the system of the mendicant orders which tended to induce rapid deterioration. The profession of mendicancy tended to encourage the use of all those little paltry arts of popularity-hunting which injure the usefulness of a minister of religion, and lower his moral tone: the fact that an increased number of friars was a source of additional wealth to a convent, since it gave an increased number of collectors of alms for it, tended to make the convents less scrupulous as to the fitness of the men whom they admitted. So that we can believe the truth of the accusations of the old satirists, that dissolute, good-for-nothing fellows sought the friar's frock and cowl, for the license which it gave to lead a vagabond life, and levy contributions on the charitable. Such men could easily appropriate to themselves a portion of what was given them for the convent; and they had ample opportunity, away from the control of their ecclesiastical superiors, to spend their peculations in dissolute living.[20] We may take, therefore, Chaucer's Friar John, of the Sompnour's Tale, as a type of a certain class of