There is evidence that at the time of the friars’ establishment in the British Isles, events were challenging the ideal of a triple-layered organisation of society described by a fourteenth-century sermon writer: ‘For in erthe byn iij degrees of folke and all schuld loue God aboue all thynge. Telynge and laborers is on of tho. Lordes and ladies is anoþer. And men and wemmen of the Churche is the thridde.’^[11] Maurice Keen summarises the documentary evidence that conditions in late-medieval England placed strains on this system, as each estate suffered a long build-up of economic and demographic distress produced by war, taxation, famine and the long-term effects of the Black Death over the course of the fourteenth century. As the population fell, wages rose, demesnes became unprofitable to farm, and labourers and lords had to re-negotiate longstanding labour relations. In addition, as the lower ranks gained economic strength following the worst of the plague years, recorded legislation shows efforts to keep them in their place, while the regular and secular clergy, including friars, were perceived to be in decline.^[12] The friars themselves came under attack for failing to live up to the apostolic ideal, and for usurping the pastoral and clerical work of the clergy.^[13] At the same time, economic changes were adversely affecting relations between landlords and their dependents. More specifically, Paul Hargreaves has examined causes and effects of tensions during the 1380s between the monks of Worcester Priory and its peasants, concluding that such tensions could be of a longstanding nature but were exacerbated by the tendency of peasants after the Black Death to appropriate chattels attached to peasant holdings, and in many cases to abscond with them. The more oppressive the conditions of tenancy, the more peasants resorted to flight. This helped to effect changes in the character of medieval property relationships.^[14] E. B. Fryde finds a very similar response to harsh treatment on the Norfolk estates of Margaret Beaufort: account rolls and court rolls for the 1370s to 1390s show tenants choosing to flee with the estate’s chattels rather than to pay dues, to the detriment of the estate.^[15] The eighteenth-century chronicler of the Berkeley family and its estates in the west of England, John Smyth, records how in the mid-1380s Lord Berkeley, like many other lords of manors, turned to leasing out his lands ‘instead of manureing his demesnes in each manor with his own servants, oxen, kine, sheep … under the oversight of the reeves of the manors’.^[16] Under such conditions longstanding bonds between lords and labourers broke down: in response, the wealthy sought greater distinction of rank by means of new sumptuary laws, and the display of lineage through the tools and texts of chivalry and the making of parks. Enclosures for sheep-pastures and sumptuous parklands, however, caused additional suffering and resentment as tenant farmers were evicted.^[17]