The theory of government wrought out in cell and lecture-room was carried over the length and breadth of the land by the mendicant brother, begging his way from town to town, chatting with farmer or housewife at the cottage door, and setting up his portable pulpit in village green or market-place.

His open-air sermons, ranging from impassioned devotion to coarse story and homely mother wit, became the journals as well as the homilies of the day; political and social questions found place in them side by side with spiritual matters; and the rudest countryman learned his tale of a king's oppression or a patriot's hopes as he listened to the rambling, passionate, humorous discourse of the begging friar.
[Sidenote: Henry the Third] Never had there been more need of such a political education of the whole people than at the moment we have reached.

For the triumph of the Charter, the constitutional government of Governor and Justiciar, had rested mainly on the helplessness of the king.

As boy or youth, Henry the Third had bowed to the control of William Marshal or Langton or Hubert de Burgh.

But he was now grown to manhood, and his character was from this hour to tell on the events of his reign.