In the great fourteenth-century fresco of the Florentine Capella degli Spagnuoli, the Dominican preacher stands in fair white tunic and black cloak amid the architectural splendours of the city, pointing the way to heaven. In the chapterhouse of San Marco, not so far away, the visitor sees the founders of all the four great Mendicant Orders, with St Bernard, prince of monastic orators, and many more, in glory around the Crucifixion scene, each with his own genius vividly portrayed by the brush of the more spiritual Dominican painter. In the ranks of the English clergy, secular as well as regular, we have found at the least a few worthy to be called sons of these prophets, personalities that we can just recognize upon the wall of history, with spiritual garments perhaps as little stained as those of Fra Angelico's heroes. But in the great procession to the pulpit there are behind them, Italians and Englishmen alike, a host of the unnamed and unremembered, lacking sometimes even the distinction of a famous habit upon their shoulders. There are men as eccentric as St Francis, without his gentleness or his genius; wild, restless spirits whose vision shifts and fades in an impatient age. The mere villain and the heretic will be among their number, too, worried as in Andrea di Firenze's picture by the Hounds of the Lord, whether the inward preacher of conscience, or the outward “preachers” in the ecclesiastical courts. With such homilists, misunderstood as often by the modern historian, as by the ancient disciplinarian, the present chapter will be mainly concerned.