Book account

" With the same glad spirit they laboured for the salvation
of souls, the cure of sickness, and the relief of distress. The
emotional feeling of the age quickly responded to their zeal. Within a
few years other houses had arisen at Gloucester, at Nottingham, at
Stamford, at Worcester, at Northampton, at Cambridge, at Lincoln, at
Shrewsbury. In a generation there was hardly a town of importance in
England that had not its Franciscan convent, and over against it a
rival Dominican house.
The esteem felt for the followers of Francis and Dominic led to an
extraordinary extension of the mendicant type. New orders of friars
arose, preserving the essential attribute of absolute poverty, though
differing from each other and from the two prototypes in various
particulars. Some of these lesser orders found their way to England. In
the same year as Agnellus, there came to England the Trinitarian
friars, called also the Maturins, from the situation of their first
house in Paris, an order whose special function was the redemption of
captives.


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