SELECTIVE BIRTH-RATE 153 



France, and Germany for English friars, as superior 

 to all others. " Nowhere," continues the enthusiastic 

 chronicler, "has the order furnished so long a 

 list of distinguished names." Roger Bacon, philo- 

 sopher and man of science ; Adam Marsh, mathe- 

 matician and trusted adviser of statesmen ; Robert 

 Grosseteste, the great administrator, Bishop of Lincoln 

 and first Chancellor of Oxford ; Duns Scotus, and 

 Occham — " schoolmen of most original and profound 

 genius " — and a host of others, not all absolutely of 

 first rank, are passed in review ; while the number of 

 intellects in the second rank that were reduced to a 

 life-interest only is left to the bewildered imagination. 

 And then, after about a hundred years, " the rest is 

 silence," or comparatively so, and England has to begin 

 again slowly to create a fresh crop of great scholars and 

 original thinkers. 



A point of secondary interest as illustrating racial 

 peculiarities (to be compared with the seafaring pro- 

 clivities of the men of Devon and the West Country), 

 is to be drawn from the history of the friars, namely, 

 the preponderance of the East Anglian element among 

 the pioneers of the movement, which spread rapidly 

 and took firm hold in that district. Canon Jessopp 

 notes that of the first eighteen masters of the Franciscan 

 school at Cambridge, at least ten were Norfolk men, 

 while four of the first five Divinity readers at Oxford 

 were East Anglians. Now three times in her history 

 East Anglia has been greatly affected by religious move- 

 ments. There the revival of the fourteenth century 

 was most intense, and there lay the stronghold of 

 Puritanism in the sixteenth. At an earlier period, too. 



