This collatio is devoid of exempla materials, although there is scope for the preacher, especially on the topical theme of the fitting exercise of authority within the order. Instead, Eccleston recounts events of the 1230s, a critical decade in the constitutional evolution of the order. The founder was dead and the order had grown spectacularly, perhaps too speedily. Chapter ten of the Rule required the ministers provincial to visitate the friars (fratres, qui sunt ministri […] visitant), but does not specify how often. The same was true, by extension, of the minister provincial. There are no hagiographical references to St Francis conducting visita-tions of provinces or individual friaries and there was no expectation that the first ministers general should systematically visitate the provinces. By the end of the 1220s the minister general was delegating this task. For instance, John, an English friar, was appointed as the first visitator (primus visitator) of the German province in 1229, at the instigation of John Parenti, minister general, who may have still been in office when William of Coleville senior was sent to England as a visitator a few years later. New developments were in the air at the beginning of the 1230s and these coincided with the election of Elias of Cortona, creating expectations which the new minister general was temperamentally unlikely to meet. General visitations were to become part of the framework of the order. The general chapter of 1230 was followed by Gregory IX’s Quo elongati on 28 September of that year and this papal document may have accelerated this development.

Elias of Cortona, elected by the general chapter of Rieti in 1232, responded to this stimulus by sending visitators, just as John Parenti had done before him. The three visitations of the English province during that decade are narrated by Eccleston. The fact that Elias employed visitators rather than visiting the provinces himself does not seem to have rankled with the friars at the time, but that percep-tion would change in the later 1230s along with expectations. Both Eccleston and Salimbene de Adam wrote from an environment in which a minister general was expected to hold visitations. Thus, the chroniclers’ comments about Elias’s refusal to visitate the provinces should be read against the backcloth of the expectations in the second half of the thirteenth century. They both wrote some time after 1239.