A Bedford Fragment and the Burning of two Fraticelli at Avignon in 1354

Summary

The heresy of the Fraticelli was one of the mystical offspring of the marriage between Saint Francis of Assisi and the Lady Poverty. The essence of the Rule on which Francis founded his Order of Friars Minor was the ideal of evangelical poverty, that his followers, possessing nothing, yet might possess all things in Christ. The main tragedy was, however, that St. Francis evolved his doctrine of holy poverty at a time when the economic structure of Europe was in the last stages of a metamorphosis from a subsistence to a money economy. Francis and his immediate followers indeed found it still feasible to subsist without the encumbrance of property of any kind—but the Poverello and his early companions were a band of saints, impelled by the faith that takes no account of mountains, and full of the sancta simplicitas which overcomes all difficulties because it does not recognise their existence. It was inevitable that, with the rapid development of the Order’s organisation and the recruitment of large numbers of friars—many of whom had left the security of secular professions in order to don the habit of the Poverello—the early, near-fanatical zeal of the first companions of St. Francis should suffer dilution; inevitable, too, that many of the more worldlywise amongst the succeeding generations of friars should be aware of the ineluctable trend of economic forces, and advocate a modification of the original rule of poverty so as to come to terms with their environment. So fundamental was this precept of St. Francis’s, however, that no absolute agreement was possible between the friars, who soon formed themselves into two bitterly opposed camps, comprising the advocates of “primitive” strictness on the one hand, and the champions of “prudent” moderation on the other. The dispute was submitted to the popes for legislation, and a series of empirical bulls was issued in an attempt to reconcile two attitudes of mind which were fundamentally irreconcilable.