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Updated: May 24, 2025
Conspicuous among the younger academical generation was Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh, whose bitter attacks on the fundamental principles underlying the mendicant theory of the regular life are indicative of the changing temper of the age.
A distinguished Oxford scholar, a learned and pungent writer, a popular preacher, a reputed saint, and a good friend of the pope, Fitzralph made himself, about 1357, the champion of the secular clergy against the friars by writing a treatise to prove that absolute poverty was neither practised nor commended by the apostles.
Nor were the orders of Franciscans and Dominicans far behind as book-collectors, though they commonly preferred to buy rather than to transcribe manuscripts, like the Benedictines. "In every convent of friars," wrote Fitzralph to the Pope, in 1350, "there is a large and noble library."
Fitzralph had the sympathy not only of the seculars, but of the "possessioners," or property-holding monks. See his De Pauperie Salvatoris, lib. i.-iv., printed by R.L. Poole, as appendix to Wycliffe, De Dominio Divino.
Lancaster met the opposition of convocation by calling to his aid the Oxford doctor whom the clergy had already begun to look upon as the enemy of the privileges of their order. Wycliffe was not as yet under suspicion of direct dogmatic heresy. He had not yet clothed himself in the armour of his Balliol predecessor, Fitzralph, to wage war against the mendicant orders.
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