Introduction

For he hadde power of confessioun

As seyde him self moore than a curat

For of his ordre he was licenciat

Ful sweetly herde he confessioun

And plesaunt was his absolucioun

He was an esy man to yeve penance,

Ther as he wiste to have a good pitaunce.¹

So wrote Geoffrey Chaucer in describing his notorious pilgrim Friar Huberd. Gower’s Vox Clamantis and Langland’s Piers Plowman had already made very similar charges.² Two anonymous Wycliffite poems of the period claimed that even if a man murdered his family, the rapacious friars would shrive him for a sixpence or for less than the cost of a pair of shoes.³

Historians have echoed this criticism, with varying degrees of caution.⁴ In 1908, George Gordon Coulton—an influential historian but also a Protestant polemicist—quoted Piers Plowman on friars giving false absolutions and stated ‘the formal records of the Church itself bear out all the gravest charges in contemporary literature.’⁵ In 1923, Joseph Kennard wrote that Chaucer’s image of friars as deceitful ‘represent[s] the typical friar as found in real life’.⁶ Bishop Moorman, in his Church Life in England in the Thirteenth Century (1945), wrote that ‘as time went on, the hearing of confessions became more and more profitable, and the right to do so was jealously claimed by the mendicants.’⁷ According to Hinnebusch, in The Early English Friars Preachers (1951),

The secular clergy formed a number of other complaints concerning the administration of the Sacrament of Penance by the friars. They claimed … that the friars granted absolution too easily, gave penances that were too light, and so made confession an avenue instead of a barrier to sin.⁸

Bowden’s Commentary on the General Prologue (1948/1967) took Chaucer’s portrait of Friar Hubert as representative of the majority of friars in confession and in all other respects:

Hubert … may have been an actual man known to the poet and his friends; he is also the perfect epitome of friars as a class. … [T]here were undoubtedly many friars who did strive to uphold the ideals of their founders, and thus compensated in part for the sinful majority. … Friars, then, were suffered to walk the earth, and there were literally thousands of them in fourteenth-century England, thousands whose guile and covetousness prompted them to meddle everywhere and in every matter.⁹

In The Friars (1994), C. H. Lawrence wrote that ‘the allegation that the friars let off penitents too lightly was a commonplace of anti-Mendicant polemics, which reflected, as much as anything else, the inability of the less educated parish clergy to adapt to the new theology of penance.’¹⁰ Robert Swanson noted in his Religion and Devotion in Europe (1995) that ‘what most people disliked was not the confession itself, but the penance and its public nature. The seculars objected that the mendicants gave penances which were too light, but rarely complained that people did not confess.’¹¹ Hagen wrote (1996) that

Chaucer closely models his portraits of Friar Huberd and Friar John on the conventions established by the antifraternal literary tradition. Thus, it can sometimes be difficult to tell what reflects historical reality and what is literary convention. … [J]ust because something is literary convention does not necessarily imply that it has no historical basis in fact. … Chaucer’s attack on the friars is so bitingly effective that it has been taken to reflect the real decline of the mendicant orders in the fourteenth century.¹²

This historiographical tradition could easily lead one to conclude that, like the fictional Friar Huberd, many real English friars probably did give easy absolutions, especially in hope of a good pittance, and that this was a cause of friction between English parish priests and mendicant friars. If so, it would conveniently explain why some laypeople were keen to confess to friars, why friars were so adamant about having the right to hear those confessions, and why some secular clergy attempted to stop them. But if this claim proves doubtful, then it will call us to reconsider the ways in which friars, seculars, and laity interacted in England during the first century and a half of mendicant history.

I will argue here that the accusation that English friars gave lighter penances than secular clergy did, particularly in order to garner donations, is not supported by the evidence. The writers cited above have either been writing polemic themselves (as Coulton was); or have failed to distinguish adequately among administrative, polemical, satirical, and literary sources; or have read the administrative sources only in light of the other categories, rather than the other way around. Literature, satire, and polemic could reflect the friars’ reputation, but it could also shape that reputation. Medieval writers may well have created cycles of confirmation bias to suit their own agendas, or at least may have naively accepted polemical narratives as factual: we would do well not to follow them blindly. Bishops’ registers and pastoral manuals are more reliable indicators of administrative reality. These should be used to put the polemic itself to the test of accuracy, and not the reverse.

Further, while the claim ‘Friars gave light penances to attract donations’ seems simple, it is in fact ambiguous, concealing the complexity of the medieval sacrament of penance. We must distinguish these questions:

1. Did the theology of penance espoused by the friars justify lighter sentences in general than the theology followed by parish clergy?

2. Were the friars too gentle in assigning penances to the wealthy and powerful as a means or courting the donor class?

3. Were friars too lax in requiring penitents, as a condition of their absolution, to pay monetary restitution to people they had harmed or cheated?

4. Were friars claiming the right to absolve penitents of all sins, including those serious sins normally reserved to the bishop’s jurisdiction?

In what follows, I will consider each of these questions in turn, with particular attention to whether there is evidence of substantive differences in the administration of penance by friars and parish clergy. The answer in each case is negative. If this is so, then, one may ask, how can we account for the widespread presence of this image of the lax but rapacious friar in later 14th-century England? By following the administrative sources forward in time, and the polemical, satirical, and literary sources backwards, I will argue for a particular moment when the image began to become influential among the English higher clergy.

A theology of lighter penances in general

The first question offers us the simplest interpretation, the one implied in Lawrence’s quote above: that friars were more willing than seculars to reduce a penitent’s penance. Theologians had long distinguished guilt, culpa, from punishment, poena. Forgiveness of culpa, which came with priestly absolution, meant that the sin would no longer result in damnation. But the forgiven sinner was still expected to serve his poena, his sentence of penitential satisfaction, either as penance in this life or as punishment in Purgatory. For many sins, canon law prescribed specific and often severe penances. From at least the Carolingian era, theologians and canonists debated how much these canonical penances should be mitigated by circumstances, particularly the sinner’s contrition.¹³ These discussions intensified in the 12^th and 13^th centuries.¹⁴ If we could line up the statements of the seculars on one side and of the friars on the other, and if we found that the seculars routinely insisted on keeping to harsher penances while the friars consistently emphasized that contrition should mitigate them, we would have our smoking gun.

We do not have to look far to find 13^th-century friars arguing that contrition, sorrow, and shame by themselves constitute the greatest part of penance, so that the priest is to weigh contrition against the sin and reduce the penance accordingly. The Summa of Alexander of Hales, Regent Master in Theology to the Paris Franciscans in the 1230s and 40s, argued that

Confession is useful … for the knowledge of sin, since the priest will make him know the quantity of his sin…. It is also useful for the purgation of sin, since blushing is the greatest part of penance…. It is useful for the assessment of penance, for the penitent’s penance is to be assessed according to the quantity of sin and the judgement of the priest. It is also useful for the infusion of grace, because sometimes someone who has not become contrite will become contrite during the confession; and if he already has the grace of contrition, confession is useful for increasing that grace. Further, it is useful for the relaxation of penance in part, by virtue of the Keys.¹⁵

Further,

Relaxations [of penance] are effective… For God remits sin by the deletion of guilt, and he commutes eternal punishment into temporal punishment. Truly, the priest relaxes from temporal [punishment]; and this is understood from John 20: ‘Whose sins you remit [etc.]’.¹⁶

Charity, expressed in true contrition, merits not only the remission of guilt, but also the remission of temporal punishment.¹⁷ Bonaventure and Alexander both argued that relaxations of penance not only reduced the penance paid in this life, but also, through the power of the keys, relaxed what the penitent owed to God in the hereafter.¹⁸ The mid-century Oxford Dominican Richard Fishacre concurred: ‘blushing in confession, since it is painful, makes satisfaction’.¹⁹ The anonymous English Dominican author of Speculum iuniorum, who relied heavily on Fishacre, paraphrased this tag at least twice.²⁰

The anonymous English Franciscan who wrote the preacher’s manual Fasciculus Morum (c. 1300) went so far as to argue,

If … your confession is bitter, it has such power that, even if you had sinned more than any person alive and the devil were to write down all your sins against you in his book of condemnation, they would all be deleted and your name would be written with the just.²¹

He also quoted an exemplum from the Vitae patrum in which a penitent monk asked his abbot for three years’ penance; the abbot insisted on only three days in light of his thorough contrition.²²

One can also find secular clergy arguing for strict adherence to canonical penance, or at least as strict as the penitent can possibly stand. For example, the Summa de penitentia of Master Serlo, presumably an English secular priest, was written some time after 1234.²³ Serlo wrote that the priest should assign penance

According to the conditions of persons – rich or poor, young or old, et cetera – according to what an examination by the discreet priest will dictate, since penances should be judged (arbitrarie), according to Jerome: that is, they should be assessed according to a rigorous weighing of the [penitential] canons. And if the rigor of the canons is to be tempered in any way, this can be attributed to several causes: that [the penitent’s] nature is more infirm, [his] fervor of love is more full, grace is less, or more frequent instances [of sin].²⁴

Serlo thus provided two possible mitigating factors (weakness and devotion) but also two factors (less grace, repetition of sin) that could intensify the penance.²⁵ Nor was Serlo the only secular who argued that priests should start with canonical penances. Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253) recommended that every priest should have a manual of canonical penances, though the discreet priest was allowed to moderate their rigor according to his arbitrium.²⁶

If we were to stop here, the thesis would appear to have been proved. Yet counterexamples of strict friars abound, including in authoritative sources such as the Summa de casibus poenitentiae of the Dominican canonist Raymund of Peñaforte. Raymund argued that purely arbitrary penances—those made up on the spot by the priest, rather than by referring to the penitential canons—were taking the lazy way out: referring to the penitential canons and restricting one’s arbitrium to modifying them was more challenging for the priest but safer for the penitent.²⁷ The Summa of Alexander of Hales drew similar boundaries. Relaxations had requirements: the priest must have the authority and discretion to grant them and must consider the infirmity and charity of the penitent before giving permission. Otherwise, the relaxation was unjust, since each sin should have its proper penalty.²⁸

Seculars who argued for more flexibility are also abundant. In a short manual for his diocesan clergy, Alexander Stavensby, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, simply wrote, ‘Since penances are given according to judgment (arbitrarie sunt), we shall not define for you any certain penances that you ought to enjoin.’²⁹ A longer tract on confession issued by bishops Cantilupe of Worcester and Quinel of Exeter for the use of their parish priests explained at some length what things a priest should consider in assigning penances; canonical penances were not even mentioned.³⁰ Unlike Grosseteste, these bishops did not recommend that parish priests should have canonical penitential manuals. Grosseteste was apparently engaging in wishful thinking: book-lists from parish visitation records show that canonical penitentials were vanishingly rare in any case, so parish clergy were hardly in a position to use them.³¹ Goering described Master Serlo’s Summa as anachronistic and out of step with developments in penitential theology, even in contrast to the views of other seculars.³²

In the 1320s, William of Pagula, an English secular priest, canon lawyer, and diocesan penitentiary, wrote a series of substantial pastoral texts for parish clergy. The most influential was his Oculus sacerdotis, a thorough manual on the care of souls. Pagula followed the scholastic tradition of psychological penance, relying heavily on Thomas of Chobham and the Dominican John of Freiburg. Pagula paid little attention to the Bolognese juridical school of penitential thought. The same can be said of a series of other 14th-century pastoral manuals that used the Oculus sacerdotis as their source or inspiration.³³ In his Oculus, Pagula recommended that the confessor should assign canonical penance for mortal sins, but he acknowledged that many penitents would be unable to bear it. The priest should therefore mitigate the penance to what the penitent could undertake, considering all of the circumstances, and trust the mercy of God that the remainder could be served in Purgatory. Pagula also envisioned the extreme case in which a sinner confessed to a sin but was unwilling to undertake any penance whatsoever, in which case he was not truly penitent and could not be absolved. He advised the priest on how to talk him into taking on at least a modicum of penance to show himself willing. Unlike Serlo, Pagula assuaged the priest’s conscience by reminding him of the example of Jesus, who never imposed a heavy penance, as when he only said to the woman caught in adultery, ‘Go and sin no more’ (John 8:11). Finally, he quoted Chrysostom via Gratian’s Decretum: ‘Where the head of the household is generous, the steward should not be stingy. If God is merciful, why should the priest want to appear harsh?’³⁴ A century later, the secular author of the Speculum Sacerdotale warned his readers that if ‘the correccion be to scharppe and cruel, haply the synner wol be a-dredde to come eny more in his hondis’.³⁵

While some friars considered shame or blushing to be a key part of penance, implying that penance can be lightened for the truly contrite, they did not invent this notion. Similar tags about contrition, shame, sorrow, or blushing being a major part—even maxima pars—of penance show up in the 12^th-century Pseudo-Augustine;³⁶ Gratian’s Decretum;³⁷ Peter Lombard’s Sentences;³⁸ Gerald of Wales;³⁹ William de Montibus;⁴⁰ Thomas of Chobham;⁴¹ Matthew Paris;⁴² bishop Quinel of Exeter;⁴³ the rectors of London parishes;⁴⁴ and even Richard FitzRalph⁴⁵ and the Wycliffite who wrote the tract De Pontificum Romanorum Schismate.⁴⁶ None of these are friars, and most of them are seculars. In short, there does not appear to have been a theological distinction between the views of secular clergy and those of the friars to justify the claim that friars assigned lighter penances than secular clergy would have given.

Easy penances for a good pittance

The cloud over the friars includes the accusation that they extorted money from their penitents in lieu of heavier penances.⁴⁷ If true, this principally would have concerned the confessions of the wealthy and powerful, who often sought out friars as confessors and who had the money to give.⁴⁸ While these formed a small minority of the population, their wealth and power presented particular pastoral problems. First, power and wealth may leave one insensitive to the sufferings of the weak and poor and thus prone to certain sins. Second, the sins of the powerful have the potential to do far more damage than the sins of the powerless, so there is a social need for the powerful to be warned and rebuked. And third, insofar as they relied on the wealthy for their material support, the friars may have been reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them. This is an important charge sometimes laid against mendicant confessors. We find it obliquely in William of St-Amour;⁴⁹ we find it at greatest length in Piers Plowman;⁵⁰ we find it most famously in Chaucer’s Prologue.

Friars and their allies were aware of this temptation. Dominican legislation explicitly forbade confessors from encouraging penitents to give to them or their order, lest they gain a reputation for cupidity.⁵¹ Thomas ‘of Eccleston’, the Franciscan chronicler of his order in England, told of Brother Solomon, one of the earliest recruits, who was warned by God in a vision that he was too forbearing towards the rich when assigning penances.⁵² A dying Robert Grosseteste—at least according to the testimony of Matthew Paris, an unfriendly observer—reminded the friars that their orders were founded in voluntary poverty precisely to free them to rebuke the sins of the powerful, and warned that they were not doing so as sharply as they ought.⁵³

Yet here too we find counterexamples. The Franciscan preacher’s manual Fasciculus Morum openly asked, ‘For who are greater sinners than the powerful?’⁵⁴ They ‘are thieves, for however much they rob the poor, they always have an answer ready that is false but appears true.’⁵⁵ In the early 14th century, the English Franciscan Nicholas Bozoun compiled his exempla collection, Les Contes Moralisés.⁵⁶ The collection is in Anglo-Norman French, which would have made it convenient for friars in frequent contact with upper-class households. One of the surviving manuscripts includes other French-language texts on subjects such as falconry and hunting, implying that its owner and copyist, Friar William Herebert, expected to be hobnobbing with the aristocracy.⁵⁷ Yet many of the Contes Moralisés are pointed denunciations of the moral failings of the wealthy and powerful. Any noble family that had Friar Nicholas (the compiler) or Friar William (the copyist) over to dinner may have gotten more than they bargained for.⁵⁸

If friars had a motive to use the confessional to cultivate donors, seculars did as well.⁵⁹ English bishops repeatedly accused their own parish clergy of using the confessional to extort money.⁶⁰ So did the Franciscan author of Fasciculus Morum.⁶¹ Secular ecclesiastical courts that dealt with public penances routinely ‘commuted’ corporal penances, such as flogging, into cash payments.⁶² Here, too, we can find no clear evidence of a distinction between mendicants and seculars.

Giving a human face to the question may help us analyze the incentives at play. In July 1347, Sir Hugh de Hastinges made his will. He left £4 to the Franciscans of London to say mass for his soul; £5 plus 20 quarters of wheat and 10 quarters of barley to the Franciscans at Doncaster for them to say mass for his soul; and £1 to Friar Thomas Canyngs, presumably a Franciscan of one of those houses. He also left 10 marks to each of his two secular chaplains for them to say mass for his soul in the parish church of Elsing, Norfolk, where he requested burial. After other legacies, the residue of his estate went to his widow, Margery.⁶³

In her widowhood, Lady Margery continued the family association with the Franciscans of Doncaster. In 1348, the Archbishop of York licensed her to have Friar Hugh de Warmesby, a Doncaster Franciscan, as confessor to herself and her household; the license was renewed in 1350.⁶⁴ Her husband’s bequest to Friar Thomas Canyngs suggests a special relationship – he may have been their household confessor before; Friar Hugh de Warmesby, her new confessor, may have reasonably expected that he or his house would receive some further legacy. And even if not, her husband had just left the Doncaster Franciscans, Friar Hugh’s own house, 240 bushels of grain, enough to keep them in bread and beer for months, not to mention the £5 in cash.⁶⁵ So when it came time for Friar Hugh to assign penances to the de Hastynges household, how harsh was he likely to be? There was at least a conflict of interest. If a friar-confessor was never tempted to go a little easy on a noble household, he would have to be a saint indeed.

Let us remember, though, that the goal here is not to exonerate the friars of an alleged pattern of behavior: it is to ask whether they behaved differently from secular clergy. It is true that the friars depended upon gifts from the wealthy, and true that the nobility sought them out as confessors. But friars were not the only option. Around the same time Friar Hugh was hearing Lady Margery’s confessions, the Archbishop of York permitted another knightly family to have as their confessor Brother John de Anston, a Premonstratension Canon from Croxton Abbey,⁶⁶ while a third knightly family was allowed to choose a suitable chaplain to serve as their confessor for two years.⁶⁷ Croxton Abbey was at this time £2,000 in debt and so had a massive incentive to cultivate noble benefactors.⁶⁸ And any secular chaplain who heard the confessions of a noble family could hope that his patrons would eventually present him to one of their benefices or at least, like Sir Hugh, nominate them as chantry priests.⁶⁹ In her widowhood, Lady Margery de Hastinges presented a chaplain, Thomas de Solihull, to the rectory of Kirk Smeaton.⁷⁰ Perhaps this was the same chaplain Thomas whom her husband had mentioned in his will, who if not a relative may have been their household chaplain or confessor before they developed their affinity with the Doncaster Franciscans.⁷¹

This was a structural problem of the medieval church. Almost any confessor to a noble household, whether a friar, a secular, or even a monastic, was reliant upon patrons whose excesses he was also expected to rebuke. If the nobility preferred friars as confessors, they were simply putting more friars into that situation. It does not follow that a friar, once in that position, was more likely than a secular priest to be unduly lenient to his patrons.

Laxity about restitution

The Memoriale Presbiterorum was a penitential manual written by an English secular cleric and canon lawyer named William Doune between 1337 and 1344.⁷² Doune was a reactionary and a rigorist: Haren describes him as ‘puritanical’ and ‘a fierce critic’,⁷³ and his work as

marked by a strong legalism in its approach to confessional technique and … a punctilious, remorseless concern for abstract justice, as is particularly evident in its burning preoccupation with restitution. Part of its criticism of the friars as confessors is their alleged readiness to sacrifice the requirements of justice to the penitent’s peace of mind. At issue is the divergence between a legalistic and a psychological approach to confessional practice.⁷⁴

Though his work apparently did not circulate, Doune himself was personally influential: he was an official of John Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter, who was in turn the mentor of Richard FitzRalph, who would become Archbishop of Armagh.⁷⁵ He also served as the bishop’s official in Lincoln and Worcester dioceses and archdeacon of Leicester in Lincoln diocese, making him ‘arguably the most important figure at sub-episcopal level in the contemporary English church’.⁷⁶

Doune claimed that the friars did not go far enough in ordering that penitents should give restitution to the people against whom they had sinned, which is another kind of light penance.⁷⁷ Many bishops and writers of pastoral manuals instructed parish clergy to insist on such restitution.⁷⁸ Around 1219, Bishop Poore of Salisbury, in his diocesan statutes, insisted that ‘sin is not remitted unless that which has been stolen is restored’.⁷⁹ A century later, William of Pagula’s Oculus Sacerdotis and Summa Summarum (1320s) and the anonymous Regimen Animarum (1343), which was also written for secular clergy, gave extensive instructions on what sins required restitution and how to use the confessional to ensure it was given.⁸⁰

Were the friars any different, as Doune alleged? Their own instructional texts show the same level concern as bishops’ statutes for parish clergy. The anonymous Dominican author of Speculum iuniorum ordered sinful profits to be returned as restitution, not given as alms.⁸¹ His confréres, Raymund of Peñaforte and William Peraldus, likewise insisted on full restitution, the latter noting that the obligation followed the sinner to the grave: burial in consecrated ground required the heirs to fulfill any incomplete restitution.⁸² The Summa of Alexander of Hales OFM required restitution for true penance in specific cases, referring the reader to the Decretals for further instructions.⁸³ Bonaventure wrote in his Collationes de Decem Praeceptis that a desire to make restitution, followed through if possible, was a necessary part of penance.⁸⁴ The Franciscan author of Fasciculus Morum, a collection of preaching materials, asked his lay listeners: ‘Who would absolve you without your making restitution? Indeed, no one alive, if you have the means.’⁸⁵ I am not aware of any sources that indicate that English parish clergy were more rigorous, or the friars any less, in ordering restitution, prior to Doune’s Memoriale Presbiterorum. It may be significant that FitzRalph’s own first recorded use of the statement ‘non est contricio nisi pretereat restitucio’ is from a sermon in Lichfield Cathedral on Pentecost 1345, when Doune’s recently-completed work might have begun to influence him. It would only be some years later that FitzRalph would explicitly accuse friars of failures in this area.⁸⁶

The rectors of London made a wide-ranging complaint about the friars to the Canterbury provincial council in 1309, seeking a definitive statement from the bishops restricting the friars’ pastoral activities of preaching, confession, and burial. The rectors accused the friars of hearing confessions of those whose payments of tithes and oblations to their parishes are overdue and allowing the penitents to present the money owed to the friars instead of their parishes.⁸⁷ This provides the only pre-Doune hint I have found accusing English friars of failing to order restitution. If the friars thus appropriated actual tithes they were certainly in the wrong; but this was not a common complaint, suggesting that it was not a common problem. And there is evidence that friars insisted that laypeople pay their tithes to their own parish priest, regardless of that priest’s personal qualities.⁸⁸ For the other oblations the London rectors mentioned, such as those that went to support lights in the parish church, perhaps what the rectors viewed as a customary right, the laity and friars viewed as a supererogatory pious gift which the giver could present wherever he saw fit.⁸⁹ This would be a disagreement about the status of customary ecclesiastical dues, not about penance itself.

Sins reserved to the bishop’s jurisdiction

William Doune also complained that friars granted absolution in cases that should be reserved to the bishop or his penitentiary.⁹⁰ This could refer to two distinct phenomena. The weaker version of the complaint would have friars absolving certain sins beyond their authority, but without claiming a superior power of absolution as a general matter. In the stronger version, a friar would be claiming either that the bishop had specifically delegated to him the authority to absolve in cases that normally would have been reserved to the bishop’s jurisdiction, or that friars as a whole had powers of absolution higher than those parish clergy had. (The language of texts can make it difficult to distinguish between these two forms of the stronger version, so they will be treated together.⁹¹) Here the evidence is more extensive and complex.

From historical sources to literary tropes

For the first explicit accusation of English friars giving esy penance (however defined) in hopes of a good pitaunce, we have to return to William Doune. Doune seems to have been at the Papal Curia on diocesan business in 1343–1344, the tail end of the period when he may have been writing the Memoriale Presbiterorum, raising the interesting possibility that his claim owed more to the Continental anti-mendicant discourse he might have encountered there than to anything he had witnessed first-hand in England.¹²⁸ Doune, considering whether it is appropriate for a penitent to make a monetary gift to his confessor, wrote:

He is obliged to relieve the indigence of his confessor if the latter is a poor man and in great need and if the penitent is someone of substance, and even if the penitent is poor he has the same obligation in so far as he can conveniently do so. But many confessors of our time and especially those of the orders of mendicants consider well that obligation and hold it as affects them, who from such a practice acquire to themselves many unlawful goods, enjoining light penances in cases where a fixed penance is laid down by the canon, and especially in cases in which it is not permitted them by law to loose or bind.¹²⁹

Here Doune faulted some seculars as well. In succeeding decades, other bishops and churchmen made this fully-developed accusation about the friars more explicitly. Yet it is noteworthy that these only came after the Canterbury Provincial Convocation of 1356, at which FitzRalph had been invited to speak on the question of mendicant privileges, so it is reasonable to assume that they had been significantly influenced by his invective.¹³⁰ John of Reading, a Benedictine chronicler at Westminster Abbey, recorded under the plague year of 1349 that ‘it is believed, therefore, that the Mammon of iniquity wounded many regulars, and lethally so the orders of mendicants’, as such confessions and very rich bequests flowed towards them that they would scarcely bother to accept alms: this made a mockery of their claims of evangelical poverty. John of Reading appears to have written his chronicle only in the mid-1360s, after FitzRalph’s influence had had time to sink in. Whether John had encountered FitzRalph in person is unknown, but he wrote approvingly of FitzRalph, his attack on the friars at Avignon in 1357, and his anti-mendicant writings.¹³¹ Crucially, John had his own motives for resentment of the friars: he was bitter that Isabella of France, the Queen Mother, had been seducta by the Franciscans into being buried at their convent in November of that year rather than at his own house—Westminster Abbey—where he believed she clearly belonged.¹³²

The encyclopedist James le Palmer, who also criticized the friars in his Omne Bonum, is closely associated with this setting as well. He was described in January 1357 as a ‘clerk of London’ and by 1359 was king’s clerk in the Exchequer, where he spent the rest of his career. Though a secular, he had connections at Westminster Abbey: not only did he purchase ink for the Exchequer from the Sacrist, he made arrangements in 1370 for his own burial there, which followed in 1375, and for a priest there to say mass for his soul.¹³³ Like John of Reading, whom he might have known, James wrote in the 1360s and cited FitzRalph with approval in his antifraternal tirades, including in his complaints about confessional practice; though while John’s chronicle only has a few comments about the friars at all, James’s Omne Bonum’s entirely unflattering article on ‘Fratres’, consisting largely of quotes from previous anti-mendicant writers, runs to eighteen large-format pages.¹³⁴ There is no sign that James directly knew William Doune, though as both were rigidly-minded bureaucrats—Sandler characterized James as ‘sanctimonious, petulant, and sometimes bitter’ and ‘a bit “holier than thou”… a government functionary who took being a cleric more seriously than some of his associates’—one senses that they were cut from the same cloth.¹³⁵ So when we hear John of Reading and James le Palmer making these accusations against the friars, we cannot consider them as independent witnesses of a historical phenomenon. We are overhearing an echo chamber.

We can trace the effects of these echoes, with a high degree of probability, well beyond the capital. Szittya noted that ‘for most of the century between the 1250s and the 1350s, the monastic and mendicant orders maintained an uneasy peace… [T]his calm came to an end around the time FitzRalph began preaching against the friars in London’, noted first in the 1357 eruption of conflict between the Benedictines of Norwich Cathedral and the Franciscans there.¹³⁶ It is not clear what triggered this dispute, only that it took the form of the monks and friars preaching against one another in public; but the timing of this and other monastic-mendicant conflicts and polemical writings in the decade from 1357 is highly suggestive of their being a direct result of FitzRalph’s campaign.¹³⁷ A similarly sudden turn can be seen in the episcopal registers outside Exeter diocese. For example, it is only from 1358, after FitzRalph’s London preaching campaign, that the register of Bishop Gynwell of Lincoln shows a curtailment of penitentiary commissions to friars, even though William Doune had been Gynwell’s diocesan official since 1352 and an archdeacon in the diocese from 1354.¹³⁸ And while Grandisson had been FitzRalph’s patron and mentor—astonishingly, a manuscript annotation survives in Grandisson’s hand in which he reminds himself to bring a passage of Augustine’s De civitate Dei to FitzRalph’s attention, as it would be useful in his arguments against the friars—influence could flow in the other direction as well, for in 1359 Grandisson issued an ‘apocalyptic’ episcopal mandate against false penitentiaries and confessors using language that seems to echo one of FitzRalph’s sermons from two years before.¹³⁹

Thus if we trace backwards the lines of influence of later 14th-century English antifraternalism, not just in general but on the matter of penances specifically, they all appear to converge on Richard FitzRalph. Even before FitzRalph became a critic of the friars, like Doune he was a ‘rigourously severe moral theologian… rather than the compassionate pastor’.¹⁴⁰ He also faced the problems of an Irish diocese riven with ethnic strife, leading to a much higher level of communal violence than English bishops faced, and he alleged that the friars were to blame for absolving offenders while he, as archbishop, struggled to impose order.¹⁴¹ When he first took up the case against the friars in Avignon in 1350, and then staged a preaching campaign in London in 1356–1357, he took the frustrations of his ungovernably violent diocese, viewed through the lens of the ‘remorseless concern for abstract justice’ he shared with Doune, possibly considered his mentor Grandisson’s frustration with questionable penitentiaries, spiced it up with William of St-Amour’s century-old polemics for rhetorical effect, and put into public circulation the images of rapacious friar-confessors that would later be used by Langland, Wycliffites, and Chaucer.¹⁴²

But were the friars guilty as charged? Williams, who assembled the evidence from administrative sources almost seventy years ago, concluded that

it is impossible to say whether such charges are substantiated or not. Several bishops thought they were and revoked the penitential commissions they had given to mendicants. Others who gave few or no commissions to the friars may have been motivated by a similar belief. On the principle that where there is much smoke there must be a little fire, we ought perhaps to conclude that the mendicants were sometimes guilty of overstepping their powers.¹⁴³

Yet Williams could find only four specific instances from the whole of the 14th century in which named friars were known to have acted in ways that justified such complaints, and two of these should be dismissed as anomalies.¹⁴⁴ I can add just one to Williams’s remaining two: around 1302, an Exeter Dominican named Hamelyn ‘was accused of openly disregarding an interdict which had been laid on the parish of Tawstock [Devon]’, and encouraging the local secular clergy to disregard it as well.¹⁴⁵ With a mere three accusations in the whole period against specific friars for overstepping their bounds, the bulk of our evidence is the bishops’ administrative actions against mendicant confessors. But so far as we can tell, these were reactions to vague reports; and as we have seen, those reports could well originate as smoke without fire.

If friars granted absolution in reserved cases, both William of Pagula and William Doune indicate that secular clergy did so as well. Such seculars could be corrected by their rural deans, archdeacons, or the bishop’s official or penitentiary: both Pagula and Doune said they had dealt with a great many such cases. Such low-level correspondence tends not to survive. By contrast, we have evidence of the accusations against the friars because they were not under a bishop’s ordinary jurisdiction. If friars reportedly exceeded their authority, bishops had to appeal to their orders’ English provincial prior or minister (as Archbishop Winchelsey did to Thomas Jorz), or to the English bishops who had been appointed their Conservators in England, or to the Prior-General or Minister-General of the order, or failing that to the Pope. Such high-level correspondence is more likely to survive, and we should expect this to skew our sample of surviving documents towards complaints about friars. And yet, tellingly, these are very rare before 1357.

Conclusion

Where, then, does this leave us? First, there is no reason to think that English seculars and friars formed different schools of thought on the question of how far to reduce a sinner’s penance because of contrition, or whether he should start with the canonical penances or just make something up as seemed appropriate. Second, there is no reliable evidence for English friars giving lighter penances to the wealthy and powerful than their secular counterparts would have. Third, there is no evidence prior to Doune in the 1340s to suggest that English seculars and friars categorically placed different levels of emphasis on restitution, and claims that they did so appear downstream of Doune’s influence. Fourth, there were allegations that friars were granting absolution in reserved cases, but it is very difficult to find any specific evidence behind it; and in any case seculars were clearly doing so as well. And fifth, the first explicit accusation of English friars giving light penances in hope of a good pittance comes from a remorseless, reactionary rigorist with a vision of a society ordered by perfect, abstract justice: William Doune, who complained not just about the friars but about everybody. Doune’s views on the friars resonated with the concerns of Grandisson and FitzRalph, who then amplified them with the force of episcopal authority and apocalyptic rhetoric.¹⁴⁶ The administrative records of other English bishops only begin to reflect Doune’s concerns about friars and penances in any significant manner after they have been heard from brother bishops. While the unflattering portrayals of friar-confessors in Langland and Chaucer could have flowed down to them by any number of tributaries, it has been suggested that both could have drunk directly from the wellspring: both could have heard FitzRalph preaching in London, and as Doune was a diocesan official in Worcester and an active preacher, Langland may have heard him there.¹⁴⁷ Yet even if neither Langland nor Chaucer had ever heard of Doune, it seems that both are ultimately indebted to him for their images of the friars.

If we look only at the polemics of the mendicant-secular debate over confession, we will find ecclesiology and even eschatology. These are rhetorical flourishes to be expected of theologians and canonists whose real concerns often lay elsewhere. Matthew Paris criticized the friars’ hearing of lay confessions, but this was only part of his broader criticism of the friars for which his motives owed much to his position as a Benedictine of St. Albans. As a monk who did not hear lay confessions, he appears to have been more concerned about what he saw as a degenerate monasticism that had suddenly become more highly regarded than his own venerable and stable order. William of St-Amour, also writing in the mid-13^th century, created the trope of Penetrans-Domos, the hypocritical holy man (a friar by implication) who flattered the rich for financial gain, on whom Langland would later base his friar of that name. William’s real game, however, was to apply existing stereotypes of heretics to the friars, as part of a campaign that turned to apocalyptic rhetoric only after his preferred canon-law case against the friars had been forestalled by the papal bull Quasi lignum vitae; and what motivated him was a dispute over professorial chairs at the University of Paris.¹⁴⁸ Rhetoric is shaped by strategy. Whether in law or in public opinion, one attacks one’s opponent with whatever one can.

Canonically, confession was the friars’ Achilles’s Heel, so it naturally became a principal locus of dispute. Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Omnis utriusque sexus fidelis, had reserved the right of confession to the penitent’s proprius sacerdos, which typically meant one’s parish priest.¹⁴⁹ The mendicant orders were in their infancy at that time, so the canon did not take them into account. But their numbers and pastoral mission expanded rapidly, and soon the canon was being glossed in ways that opened loopholes for the friars.¹⁵⁰ In 1246, Matthew Paris accused the Dominicans of sowing doubt among laypeople as to whether their parish priests were ignorant, the blind leading the blind.¹⁵¹ This was not a general insult but rather a specific canonical gambit: Gratian’s Decretum allowed parishioners to resort to a confessor other than their proprius sacerdos in exactly this situation.¹⁵² Paris was often critical of the friars and his descriptions of them should not be taken at face value, but here we can corroborate his claim.¹⁵³ A sermon to the laity encouraging Lenten confession, found in an English Franciscan preacher’s handbook of the late 13^th century, laments the ignorance and unworthiness of many secular priests and quotes the familiar passage about the blind leading the blind; the implication to confess to a friar instead is never quite spelled out, though it would be hard for the listener not to draw the inference.¹⁵⁴

The seculars pushed back. In the 1280s, Archbishop Peckham complained that

certain persons, at the instigation of the Enemy of the human race, are sowing a certain pernicious teaching, daring to assert that our beloved Friars Minor seduce souls in hearing confessions, [and that] they have no power to bind or loose without the license of the parish priests.¹⁵⁵

Who were these ‘certain persons’? ‘Rectors, vicars, and those having cure’ of souls.¹⁵⁶ And we need not assume with Pecham that any demonic influence was required, since in the 1280s there was a contentious debate, among popes, theologians, and canonists at Paris and elsewhere, about the friars’ confessional privileges.¹⁵⁷ No doubt many a parish priest could not confidently follow the debate and decided to err on the side of caution, while some others knew better and merely exploited the uncertainty.

In 1309, the rectors of London complained at length that the friars were diverting parishioners and their offerings by appropriating the rights of preaching, confession, and burial (and it is burial, since it brought bequests and payment for prayers for the deceased, that was given the most space).¹⁵⁸ As a result, money on which the parish clergy had relied for their livelihood was being channelled into the enormous new churches the friars were completing in London in those very years.¹⁵⁹ The London rectors’ concern was unabashedly monetary; their ecclesiology was fundamentally practical and, if not cynically self-serving, then at least self-preserving.

These English opponents of the friars were diverse in their motives, but they have one thing in common: despite contesting the friars’ rights to hear confessions, they made no accusation that the friars gave light penances in hope of gain.¹⁶⁰ Surely they would not have left that rhetorical arrow in their quiver if it could plausibly be fired. As cautious as we should be about arguments from silence, its absence is reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes’ clue of the dog that did not bark in the night-time.

Grandisson and his protegés Doune and FitzRalph were ultimately just as practical in their concerns.¹⁶¹ All three sought to impose effective social discipline as a function of the bishop’s responsibility for the well-being of his diocese and its parishioners. When secular clergy erred in the matter of absolution, the diocesan administration could correct them. But if friars committed similar errors, the diocesan hierarchy could not bring them to heel in the same way, and sometimes it struggled even to know what was going on—hence Grandisson’s admitted doubt, in two separate instances, about whether the alleged perpetrators were even real friars at all. The itineracy of the friars contrasted here with the relatively settled existence of the parish clergy in ways that cannot have made the bishops’ jobs any easier, and the fact that Grandisson’s troubles accelerated after the disruptions of the Black Death should not be overlooked either.¹⁶² The frustration of Grandisson’s circle was not that the friars’ behavior was worse than that of their secular counterparts but that mendicant pastoral care formed an effective exit point from the diocesan disciplinary structure, undermining the unified hierarchical control these seculars sought to impose.¹⁶³ So Doune grumbled in writing, Grandisson revoked licenses and commissions, and finally FitzRalph lashed out on the national and international stage.

Once this specific portrayal of the friars was in public circulation in England, it had enough similarities to various other critiques of the mendicants that churchmen suddenly began to believe it and act accordingly, a phenomenon that today we would describe as confirmation bias. As propaganda, as a literary trope, or even as gossip, a charge of hypocrisy, once made, is just too appealing to leave on the table. After the charge emerged in the 1350s from the lips of FitzRalph, whose diocese was not even in England, and was then echoed and reinforced by men of influence, we can no longer put any credence in its historicity when made by English writers, regardless of whether their goals were literary, polemical, reformist, or even merely administrative. As Friar Thomas Jorz pointed out to Archbishop Winchelsey, we would do well not to believe every rumor we hear.

Competing interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.