combat -- they were puritanical! The friars began as Catholic Puritans, and the Puritans were the Cathars. Puritans always took most seriously the wickedness of the material world. The monks who lived by the discipline of the original monastic rules were subject to a severe discipline indeed -- "the discipline of the quarter deck" as G G Coulton called it. Laughter, play, dancing and public festivities were improper and forbidden to them, as they were to anyone who wanted to save their souls. The fact that heretics and later witches did not mind enjoying themselves offended people brought up so strictly. Yet, S Bonaventura complained, only a generation after S Francis had died, that the friars who tried to keep S Francis's Rule strictly were a laughing stock to the majority of self-satisfied Franciscans. Thomas of Eccleston wrote: Self-indulgence will grow in the Order as insensibly as hairs grow on a man's beard. S Thomas Aquinas had concluded that not even the pope could order a friar to break his solemn vow. As if to prove him wrong, Pope John XXII, in 1317, made it a heresy for a friar to disobey his superior by wearing the short robes S Francis had commanded or refusing to beg for grain and wine to fill the barns and wine cellars S Francis had forbidden to those vowed to poverty. The outcome was that Catholic Christians were burnt as heretics. Four were burnt, in 1318, for denying that the pope could break their