Wadding, the great annalist of the Franciscans, while deploring the
notorious decadence in the _morale_ of the mendicant orders
during the fourteenth century--a decadence which he does not attempt
to deny--attributes it wholly to the action of the Black Death, and
is glad to find in that calamity a sufficient cause for accounting
for the loss of the old prestige which in little more than a century
after St. Francis's death had set in so decidedly. "It was from this
cause," he writes, "that the monastic bodies, and especially the
mendicant orders, which up to this time had been flourishing in
virtue and learning, began to decline, and discipline to become
slack; as well from the loss of eminent men as from the relaxation of
the rules, in consequence of the pitiable calamities of the time; and
it was vain to look for reform among the young men and the
promiscuous multitude who were received without the necessary
discrimination, for they thought more of filling the empty houses
than of restoring the old strictness that had passed away." How could
it be otherwise? In the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, at least
_nineteen_ religious houses were left without prior or abbot. We
may be quite sure that where the chief ruler dropped oft the brethren
of the house and the army of servants and hangers-on did not escape.
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