The studies in this volume on the economy of the mendicant orders in the later Middle Ages comprise monographs by twenty different authors, as well as an introduction and an extensive conclusion by the editors. They are the product of a common research enterprise initiated by Nicole Bériou and Jacques Chippoleau nine years ago at a colloquium held at the École française of Rome. They address in the first place a well recognised problem of mendicant historiography: the paucity of documentation for the internal management and economy of the friaries for the first century of their existence. Unlike the monastic houses, the friars, with few exceptions, kept no deeds or cartularies because they owned no land. Their founders had committed them to an ideal of organised poverty which disallowed the acquisition of property or even the use of money, an ideal expressed and symbolised by the practice of regular begging for food and other basic necessities. A major value of these studies lies in the detailed reports by the authors on the nature and whereabouts of the documentary sources of the various houses that they have examined. A special effort was required to collect many of these, as they lie scattered among the municipal and legal records of the cities that housed the friars.

From the last decades of the thirteenth century onwards, the friars sought to supplement the precarious proceeds of begging by a more regular and reliable income derived from rents and sales, and many of their houses embarked upon systematic record-keeping of their financial transactions. The archives of the Franciscans at Avignon, here described in detail by Clément Lenoble, are a conspicuous example, comprising eleven volumes recording wills and property titles, and four volumes of daily accounts covering the years 1359 to 1489, now housed in the departmental archives of Vaucluse. Archives such as these provide the basis for this comparative history of the economic management and life-style of the mendicant houses in the fourteen and fifteenth centuries.

After the death of St Francis, efforts to reconcile his ideal of apostolic poverty with the practical needs of a pastoral mission were to involve heroic gymnastics of conscience. As early as 1230 the Franciscan ministers obtained from the pope a judgement mitigating their rule by allowing them to appoint a trustee or ‘spiritual friend’ who would receive and hold money on behalf of the brethren, to whom they could apply to pay for necessities. Their search for income was encouraged by the lay patrons and their generosity proved hard to resist. Besides the sums given by lay donors in return for burials, anniversary masses and other spiritual services, the friars generally sought a more stable income from rents assigned to them by property owners. Another common source of income was the sale of surplus offerings, including foodstuffs, obtained in the regular begging quests that the friars continued to practice.

The relative scale of these various components of their livelihood is well illustrated by the chapter in this book on the six London friaries by Jens Rohrkasten, who has already published a book on the subject. These, apart from the Poor Clares, possessed no landed property in the city except the precincts on which their claustral buildings stood. The Dominicans, however, took advantage of their extensive site to erect houses on it and created a residential hotel in their conventual building. In 1540 the revenue from these properties was found to exceed £300. The Austin Friars followed the Dominicans in this form of enterprise by creating tenancies on their premises, one of their first tenants being none other than Master Thomas Cromwell. The Franciscans, on the other hand, enjoying a less favourable site, drew most of their income from testamentary bequests and other gifts from the laity. It is recorded that the Observant Franciscans at Greenwich showed a marked preference for gifts in kind rather than for money.

These excellent studies show that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries rents appear in the receipts of the mendicants as a stable element alongside periodic gifts of money from princes, cities and individuals. This modest enrichment of their communities evoked increasingly bitter protests from the ‘Spirituals’ – the reformers in their ranks who regarded this development as a betrayal of their founders' ideal of apostolic poverty. In an interesting chapter Sylvain Piron vindicates the bitter strictures of Uberto de Casale on the aristocratic lifestyle of the Franciscans at Santa Croce in Florence. All the authors in this volume display an awareness of this critique; but in general their findings are sympathetic to the efforts of the friars to establish their mission on a more practical basis. As Chiffoleau points out, income from rents rarely exceeded more than 20 per cent of their total revenue, and their persistence in regular campaigns of begging attested their determination to reconcile new sources of income with the ideal of voluntary poverty. In most cases the major part of their resources came from testamentary bequests of the laity, grants for anniversaries and other services, which demonstrated the continuing appreciation of city congregations for their ministry.