The process by which the brotherhood, founded by the unlettered Francis as a new manifestation of the folly of the Cross, became in less than fifty years one of the two ‘student orders’ of the Church, whose policy was directed by a group of the most celebrated teachers of Europe, began at Paris and developed almost exclusively there and at Oxford. In this transformation it may be claimed that Englishmen played a predominant part, for it was the conversion of eminent English teachers at Paris that began the movement north of the Alps; some of them, remaining in France, became the spokesmen of the French province; others migrated to Oxford, where they were joined by recruits of the same stamp, and together they gave immediate éclat to the school of the Friars Minor; finally, in the century that followed, almost all the Franciscan doctors of the first rank were Englishmen, with the eminent exception of Bonaventure.

The Friars Preachers had arrived in Paris in 1217; the Friars Minor came three years later. To the outward view there was probably little difference between the types of men and of mind at the two convents; both groups preached, and both lived lives of striking simplicity and fervour. But if both also attracted to themselves the more earnest of the masters and scholars, the most brilliant recruits of the early years went to the Franciscans.