‘Enticed by the wiles of the friars and by little presents[529], these boys (for the friars cannot circumvent men of mature age) enter the Orders, nor are they afterwards allowed, according to report, to get their liberty by leaving the Order, but they are kept with them against their will until they make profession; further, they are not permitted, as it is said, to speak with their father or mother, except under the supervision and fear of a friar; an instance came to my knowledge this very day; as I came out of my inn an honest man from England, who has come to this court to obtain a remedy, told me that immediately after last Easter, the friars at the University of Oxford abducted in this manner his son who was not yet thirteen years old, and when he went there, he could not speak with him except under the supervision of a friar.’ Parents were in consequence afraid to send their sons to the Universities, and preferred to keep them at home as tillers of the soil. While the numbers both of the friaries and of their inmates had enormously increased, the number of secular students in every faculty decreased; the students at Oxford, who in his time were reckoned at 30,000, had now sunk to 6000. Though these figures are of course preposterously exaggerated, and though the main cause of the diminution of the number of students was the Black Death, there can be no doubt of the essential truth of the accusation. In 1358 the University of Oxford passed a statute forbidding the admission of boys under eighteen to the Orders. The statute deserves to be quoted at length[530].