It has been clearly shown by recent criticism[535] that Wiclif’s enmity to the friars was confined to the last few years of his life. His earlier opponents were the monks--the _religiosi possessionati_. At one time he compares the poverty and mendicancy of St. Francis with the manual labour of St. Peter and St. Paul, in contrast with the possessions and worldly honours of the ecclesiastics of his time[536]. He seems to have been on terms of some intimacy with William Woodford, who may be regarded as the leader of the Oxford Minorites in their subsequent controversy with the reformer and his followers. Woodford relates[537] that ‘when I was lecturing concurrently with him on the Sentences[538] ... Wiclif used to write his answers to the arguments, which I advanced to him, in a notebook which I sent him with my arguments, and to send me back the notebook.’ Wiclif had indeed many points of sympathy, especially on questions of ecclesiastical polity, with the Friars Minors. He was in agreement with them and in antagonism to the monks and many of the bishops, in the opinion that the tribute to the Pope should be refused, and that the secular power was, under some circumstances, justified in depriving the Church of its possessions[539]. Eight or nine years before Wiclif wrote his famous tract in defence of the Parliament of 1366, an Oxford friar and doctor declared in his school that the King had the right of depriving ecclesiastics of their temporalities; he was ordered by Congregation to recant this and other opinions solemnly after a University sermon, and to pay 100_s._ to the University[540]. When, however, Wiclif began to call in question the Church’s doctrine on the Eucharist, he found himself in direct antagonism to the friars; and the quarrel, which began in a dogmatic difference in the schools[541], soon acquired a wider character. Wiclif’s accusations resolve themselves really into three[542]; firstly, that the friars upheld the ‘idolatrous’ doctrine of the Eucharist; secondly, that they maintained the theory of the mendicancy of Christ; thirdly, that they taught the people to rely for their salvation on letters of fraternity and prayers and masses, instead of on a good life; whence a general demoralization ensued. ‘Popis graunten no pardoun to men bot if þei be byfore verrely contritte, bot þese freris in hor lettres speken of no contricioun[543].’