The influence of the Church during the mediæval period was great. In London the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's (secular canons) held the first place after the bishop, then came other bodies of secular and regular canons, followed by the monks and friars and officers of the hospitals, etc. Last in rank, but most esteemed by the people, came the rectors and vicars of the various parishes. Here was a large army of persons forming the officials of the Church, and the buildings of the Church occupied a very large portion of the city and of the land beyond its walls. Between the secular and the regular clergy a great feud always existed. During the Saxon period the number of religious houses was few, but a great increase occurred almost immediately after the Conquest. Monasteries grew in number rapidly during the Norman period, but in time the monks having grown rich and lazy the need of a revival became evident. The great movement of evangelisation which took place during the early Plantagenet period when the friars came from Italy to England caused a religious revolution. Poverty and humility were the great principles of the friars, but these were soon forgotten, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries all the regulars became equally obnoxious to the reformers. Wycliffe and his followers preached against them, and writers with such different views as Langland and Chaucer had little but evil to say of them. Chaucer condemns monks and friars alike, and reserves his praise for the poor parish priest. We must first deal with the bishop and the secular clergy, and then consider the conditions relative to the establishment of the regulars, ending with a note on education in London during the Middle Ages. The Cathedral Church of St. Paul's is of great antiquity, and was established in the first period of Saxon Christianity. There have been three buildings on the same site, and the first was erected in the earliest years of the seventh century by Mellitus the missionary bishop and Ethelbert, King of Kent. Although this church existed for nearly five centuries no record whatever remains of it. Sir Gilbert Scott wrote: 'I am not aware that we have any information as to the Cathedral built by the companions of Augustine (Mellitus and Justus) at London and Rochester. Curiously enough there continues to this day at Rochester, and continued to the seventeenth century in our own St. Paul's equally as at Canterbury, a crypt beneath the elevated sanctuary, no doubt the lineal successor and representative of those erected by these missionary bishops, in imitation of the great basilica at Rome, whence they had been sent to evangelise this distant region.'[354]