This chapter will look at how friars who entered the home as confessors and healers were depicted in literary and polemical sources. In the first section, I will consider the satirical attacks on friars, which centre on their unprecedented access to homes and the temptations to which this access gives rise. The sources are to be found in a wide variety of written materials, from learned scholastic attacks on the mendicant orders, to encyclopedias, sermons, poems (by the greatest English poets of the era), anonymous lyrics and scurrilous squibs. The second and third sections will focus not on surveying the field as a whole but on close analysis of William Langland's great late fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman. Langland engages with questions relating to the friars’ role in society and the impact of confession on the mutual influences of body and soul, at a much deeper level than the satires allow. In section two, the personification of one of the seven deadly sins in passus 5 of Piers Plowman, Envye, is closely linked to the character of a friar, and the interrelationships of sin, bodily illness and confession are explored in language which exploits Langland's extensive knowledge of practical medicine texts, as well as of the pastoral literature of confession. The third section deals with the climax of Langland's poem, in which the friar is a central character presented allegorically as potential healer or leech of the mortally wounded English church, but he is undermined in this salvific role by the institutional and moral failings of the mendicant orders. The last section of the chapter will consider the relation between the Piers Plowman tradition and scholastic debates in the era of Lollardy.

Before discussing these ‘external’ criticisms of friars’ behaviour in the home, we should remember that friars themselves were very much aware of the temptations and dangers attached to their role as confessors. Friar Thomas described the coming of the Franciscans to England (see Chapter 1), and his account features a long description of the illnesses and attempted treatment of Brother Solomon in the London house. He was first healed of a gutta in his foot by a visit to the shrine of St Eloy in Flanders. He went on subsequently to high office as guardian at the London Franciscan house and general confessor to the city of London