Educational Organisation of the Mendicant Friars in England (Dominicans and Franciscans)

Abstract

The absence of authentic materials will probably make it for ever impossible to recover with any degree of accuracy or fulness the history of the Mendicant Orders in England. Save for a few stray extracts embedded in other documents, all the Acts of the provincial chapters of all the four Orders in England are lost, and have been lost for centuries. It is in those Acts that one would have hoped to find the outlines of the educational organisation of the friars. In the absence of this source of information one has to rely on a few chronicles, a few letters, the general Constitutions of the Orders, the Acts of the General Chapters, the registers of the general masters, and the Acts of the provincial chapters of other provinces. But even here the Quellen are very incomplete: many have been lost; many exist only in manuscript or in very rare editions; while the manuscripts are generally difficult of access to an English student. In the present paper I have been compelled, owing to the want of materials, to omit all mention of Carmelites and Austin Friars, and to confine myself to Dominicans and Franciscans.