Long even before the birth of S. Bernardino a much older order or _Confraternità_ held its meetings in the small church at the back of the present oratory. This was the _Confraternità di S. Andrea della Giustizia_, and it was one of the earliest of those remarkable societies--one may almost describe them as religious guilds--which rose up out of that great devotional movement at the end of the middle ages which resulted in the extraordinary processions and displays of the "Flagellants." "The movement," says Doctor Creighton, "passed away; but it has left its dress as a distinctive badge to the confraternities of mercy which are familiar to the traveller in the streets of many cities of Italy."
Morals, as we have seen, were very low in the thirteenth and the fourteenth century; blood flowed freely in party feuds and towns were devastated and corrupted by the strife of church and people. All these things, and the great pestilence which ravaged the country and the cities, were taken, and probably with perfect justice, to be the signs of an offended deity. "It was then," says Bonazzi, "when men had grown familiar with death, that those strange songs arose which the people sang in the moonlight, wrapped in white sheets, whilst they danced the dances of the dead about the streets, clanging the bones together in weird accompaniment to their songs." Doctor Creighton[81] dates this movement to the end of the fourteenth century. He says also that it originated in Provence. Perugia, however, lays strong claim to having herself sown the first seed, and this as early as the middle of the thirteenth century, of the displays of the Flagellants.
In 1265 we read the strange tale of a monk who describes himself as "_Fra Raniero Fasano de Peroscia Comenzatore della Regola dei Battuti di Bologna_." Raniero tells us that he was accustomed, as a young monk at Perugia, to lead a life of excessive privation and abnegation, and one day, when scourging himself as was his custom, he was joined in a vision by certain saints who accompanied him to the church of S. Fiorenzo, and there they all beat themselves together in front of the high altar. This vision occurred day after day to Raniero, but at last one of the saints spoke to him and told him that it was the will of heaven that men should purge their sins in this same fashion. Raniero carried his tale to the Bishop, who expounded it in a sermon to the inhabitants of Perugia, and this, according to some historians, was the origin of all the fantastic demonstrations of public repentance which soon spread over Italy, and from which, as years went by, there arose the calmer and more practical institutions of Confraternities in the several cities. One of the earliest of these at Perugia itself was the company of S. Andrea, and it is interesting to read its laws and statutes. Through its own annals we find that it was started in 1374, during the reign of Pope Gregory XI. "for the furtherance of the worship of God and of His Mother the blessed Virgin Mary, and of the glorious martyrs and protectors of the city--Messers Sancto Ercolano, Sancto Laurenzo, Sancto Costanzo, and Sancto Andrea the apostle; and for the honour and estate of the Holy Mother Church and her protectors; and further for the maintenance, the governing, the magnificence, and the peaceful state of the people and the city of Peroscia."