Infinite and careful laws of civil and religious duties follow--laws for the maintenance of peace and the Christian comfort of souls: the day of the saint was to be most strictly kept, fasting if possible, or by him who could not fast, a feast was to be given to a beggar or twenty-five paternosters told, "and all must be at mass that day or pay a fine of twenty soldi." But the great work of the society of S. Andrea was the help and protection of criminals. Its members got permission from the city government to meet those who were going to execution, and to accompany them to the scene of death, comforting them by the way, and sustaining them with prayers and even sweetmeats to the very last. In early times criminals were beheaded far from the city walls; and in Perugia the place of doom was down in the open country on the site of an old Etruscan tomb, the Torre di S. Manno. "Wherefore," writes one historian, "in the fatal passing of these miserable people, the pious _disciplinati_ met them on the threshold, comforted them, assisted them, and went with them even unto the gallows." Hence probably the name of "Giustizia" given to this particular square, and not, as is usually said, because justice was carried out on the spot itself.
The _Confraternità_ of S. Andrea continued to increase both in power and in size. Other societies of the same charitable sort sprang up all through the city, and after the death of S. Bernardino of Siena a new one was started in his name at Porta Eburnea. But in one of the great fights between the nobles, their buildings were so knocked about and mutilated that the members of the society had to seek out different quarters, and they then joined themselves to the older confraternity of S. Andrea down at S. Francesco and thenceforth "worked together, extending their labour of charity to the inspection of prisons, and to the Christian comfort of prisoners."[82]
To the right of the Oratory of S. Bernardino is the immense, but quite ruined, church and convent of S. Francesco al Prato. S. Francesco, more even than S. Domenico and so many of the churches of Perugia, is only the skeleton of a once beautiful body from which the silken robes, the jewels, even the flesh, have been torn rudely off by men and time. The church was built in 1230, in the form of a Latin cross with a single nave. But from the moment it was built, owing to the crumbling nature of the soil, and the heavy and overweighted style of its architecture, it was threatened with immediate destruction, so that in 1737 it fell in almost completely.