On the eve of the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, the variety of types of mendicant religious was considerable. It included, besides the powerful followers of Francis and Dominic, friars with eremitical roots from different regions of Italy and from the Holy Land, urban friars from Provence who dressed in sackcloth, ‘penitential friars’ from Marseilles, friars dedicated to the ransoming of prisoners, and friars who wore robes decorated by a huge star (the ‘Bethlehemite friars’). The council decreed, however (with enthusiastic backing from the Franciscans and Dominicans), that any religious order that could not prove that its existence predated the decree Ne nimia religionum of Fourth Lateran (1215) should be suppressed, and its members assimilated into the remaining orders. The Carmelites and the Augustinian friars were able, after some uncertainty, to pass this test, but the Sack Friars, Pied Friars and the other very small groups about whom the evidence is nugatory, came to a sudden end.

Most students – the readership at whom Frances Andrews's book is aimed – will scarcely have heard of these ‘other friars’, let alone have had any exposure to their histories or characteristics. The other friars would thus provide a valuable service even if it did no more than introduce readers to the variety of mendicant profession in thirteenth-century Europe. As it is, it does very much more than this. Andrews manages to present her thesis with great clarity of organisation and lucidity of expression, yet without compromising the deep scholarship that obviously forms the bedrock of the book. The basic premise of the book is that the ‘other friars’ were far more important to contemporaries than they have been to most subsequent historians. The Carmelites in particular had already attracted royal patronage in England and France before 1274, and Philip iii of France and Peter iii of Aragon continued to give their support even during the period before papal confirmation was restored. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Carmelites had adopted a new image through a change of habit, and had begun to make an impact in the universities and secular courts. Just as the Carmelites turned the obscurity of their origins to their advantage through the deployment of foundation legends, so the Augustinian Hermit Friars insisted on an historical link to Augustine of Hippo to underwrite their identity. Both orders withstood challenges from rivals – the Dominicans in the case of the Carmelites, the Hermit Friars from the Augustinian canons. By 1324 the tomb of Augustine in Pavia was in the care of the Hermit Friars. Both orders produced noted theologians in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as John Baconthorpe, Thomas Netter, Giles of Rome and Nicolò da Tolentino. More important perhaps, Andrews shows how they were able to negotiate a place for themselves within existing communities, lay and religious, in societies as diverse as Italy, Germany, the Spanish kingdoms and England. It is striking to observe, for example, the resources available to the Hermit Friars from a tax levied by the order on its own provinces in order to mount an assault on the anti-mendicant views of Richard Fitzralph in 1358. Poorer relations of the Franciscans and Dominicans they may have been, but their resources far outpaced those available to the archbishop of Armagh.

This is all the more impressive given the disparate and diffuse origins of the Augustinian Hermit Friars, an order created from a number of localised groups of Italian hermits in the ‘Great Union’ of 1256. Having engineered the union, popes in the 1260s did their best to support the new order against inevitable competition from the established friars through grants of privileges. The Hermit Friars, however, faced not only external competition but also the resistance of some of the constituent groups to the loss of local autonomy and the imposition of the Rule of Augustine. The survival and prosperity of the order is, perhaps, as surprising as the sudden collapse of the Sack Friars (more properly, Friars of the Penitence of Jesus Christ) must have been to observers in 1274. Salimbene's famously bitter invective against them shows how far they had come since their inception, perhaps as an offshoot of the Franciscans, in the 1240s. Papal support in 1251 recognised the existence of thirteen houses and the adoption of the Rule of Augustine. By 1274 the order had 122 houses, more than the Carmelites or Augustinian Hermits, and had attracted royal and noble patronage in England and Aragon. They were quicker than the Carmelites to see the advantages of higher learning for the progress of the order. Andrews argues persuasively that the decree of the Council of Lyons caught the Sack Friars unawares, and that their own lack of a powerful advocate left them exposed to the jealousy of the longer-established orders. The Sack and Pied Friars were allowed to continue to maintain existing houses, but neither to found new ones nor to recruit new members; both orders therefore simply withered on the vine. Friars themselves might continue until death, or transfer to an approved order. Surprisingly, there is evidence for local survivals, such as the Pyrenean house of Puigcerdà, which continued until 1328. It may be that precisely such localised strengths operated at the expense of the internationalism needed to lobby successfully for exemption from the decree of 1274. Amongst the strengths of Frances Andrews's book is her ability not only to get something out of the apparently bare cupboard of sources for the suppressed orders, but to integrate all the disparate material available into a meaningful synthesis.

A study of the career and letters of Adam Marsh provides some of the reasons for the success of the Franciscans at the expense of other mendicants who claimed to be providing very similar services for the laity and the Church. Friars did not come much better connected than Adam, an aristocratic Oxford theologian who maintained close links between his patron and friend Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, the Franciscan establishment in England and the court, particularly in the person of Henry iii's queen, Eleanor of Provence. A friar who had the ear of the queen, a hand in the avant-garde scholarship on Greek patristic commentary fostered by Grosseteste, and responsibility for the pastoral training of the next generation of friars was a man with wider influence and broader knowledge of the Church than most other mendicant orders could boast. Adam's letters, the majority of which were to Grosseteste, reflect his concerns for the integrity of the Franciscan profession. Although, as a lifelong scholar who was first exposed to the order in Oxford, and who was ‘head-hunted’ as a replacement for Alexander of Hales by the Franciscan house at Paris in 1244, he was hardly the kind of Minor Francis himself had in mind, he defended poverty with zeal, having himself given up a comfortable benefice in the gift of his uncle, the bishop of Durham. He supported the opposition to the compromised Master General Elias of Cortona in 1239. As letters both to Grosseteste and others demonstrate, he was scathing about clerical abuses such as pluralism, concubinage and poor pastoral provision. He replied in sarcastic terms to a letter from Richard of Gravesend, who had written complacently about the living of Thame, which had a perpetual vicar whose presence would relieve him of cure of souls: ‘From which part of a cure of souls, I ask, will a vicar exonerate a rector, since before the dread judgement-seat both of them are gravely obligated by a solemn promise and both are bound by an unchangeable decree not to a part, but to the whole?’

This volume is accompanied, as one would expect from an editor of the experience of C. H. Talbot, by a fine introduction to Adam himself and to the general context in which his life was played out. The translations are clear and preserve effectively the slightly fussy scholarly tone of the original. When the second volume of letters appears, it will surely replace Brewer's original volumes for the Rolls Series as the definitive edition.