The mendicant orders of friars were introduced into England in the year 1221; and they presently supplanted the antient establishments in the veneration of the people, and usurped many of the prerogatives, honours, and profits of the sacerdotal office. As long as they retained their original character, and practised, to any great extent, the rigid morality and discipline which they professed, so long did their influence continue without diminution, and the clamours of the monks and the priests assailed them in vain: but prosperity soon relaxed their zeal and soiled their purity, and within a century from the time of their institution, they became liable to charges as serious as those which had reduced the authority of their rivals. Accordingly, towards the middle of the following century, the contest was conducted with greater success on the part of the original orders; and some of the leading prelates of the day took part in it against the Mendicants. Oxford was naturally the field for the closest struggle, and the rising talents of Wiclif were warmly engaged in it. About the year 1360 he is generally believed to have first proclaimed his hostility “against the orders of friars;” and he persisted, to the end of life, in pursuing them with the keenest argument and the bitterest invective, denouncing them as the authors of “perturbation in Christiandome, and of all the evils of this worlde; and these errors shallen never be amended till the friars be brought to freedom of the Gospel and clean religion of Jesu Christ.” In the year 1365 Urban V. renewed the papal claim of sovereignty over the realm of England, which was founded on the submission rendered by John to Innocent III. The claim was resisted by Edward III., and the decision of his parliament confirmed, in the strongest language, the resolution of the monarch. A zealous advocate of papacy ventured to vindicate the pretension of the Vatican, and challenged Wiclif to reply to his arguments. He did so; and his reply has survived the work which gave it birth. It is not however remarkable for any power of composition, still less can it be praised for grace or accuracy of style; but it stands as a rude monument of his principles, and proves that even then he was imbued with that anti-papal spirit which more splendidly distinguished his later years. Still, he was not yet committed as the adversary of Rome; and in a dispute, in which he was engaged with the Archbishop of Canterbury at this very time, he appealed from the decision of the Primate to the authority of the Pope.