of Strivelin, and, being very much afraid lest he should be taken prisoner, he was told by the said poet that he should certainly escape if he would commend himself to the Virgin Mary, to whom the College of the Carmes at Oxford was dedicated. Trusting to his advice, the King escaped; but the poet was taken prisoner, and condemned to write a poetical history of the Kings of Scotland. However, his verses were too flat and jejune even for a Scotch epic, and he was released. Returning to Oxford, he reminded the King of his promise to the Carmelites, and the King, so far from being displeased with the hint, gave them his Palace of Beaumont at Oxford in 1314, "where they afterwards lived in very great splendour, to the envy and discontent of many that were acquainted with their former way of living." They either let or sold their old buildings in the small quadrangle to Gloucester College, though they apparently retained land on this side of Stockwell Street till the Reformation.

After the meeting of the Benedictines in 1291, the College should have been properly established; but it is clear that in the next few years there were some very considerable changes in the character of the endowment. The causes for the alterations that ensued are unknown to us, but for some reason John Giffarde thought it necessary to alter or modify his grant. In the last years of his life he fell into the hands of the Abbot of Malmesbury. The abbot persuaded him to annul the deed by which he had already conveyed away the College. This could easily be done, as the grant was to a corporation which did not exist, and a grant of the ground on which the College stood was made in almost identical

words with those of the earlier deed, the only difference being that the name of the Abbot of Malmesbury was inserted as grantee. The copy of this deed, which is at present in the Bodleian, is written in a handwriting of about 1480. But the claim of Malmesbury was set up at a much earlier date, and even if the deed itself were a forgery, it would still substantially represent the position which the Abbot of Malmesbury maintained with a great measure of success. The effect was to annul all the provisions of the chapter. Gloucester College could no longer be an independent priory, as Malmesbury had become the freeholder of the site, and the dual ownership was one of the causes that impaired the harmony of the College for many years to come. Malmesbury claimed that the whole of the land on which the College stood belonged to them. In legal processes they referred to it as the Priory of the Abbey of Malmesbury. There are deeds in existence which relate to buildings both on the north and the south of the College in which the abbey granted licenses to build, and conveyances of land. The fishponds, gardens, and meadows, which were to have been the common property of the students, became the especial preserve of the students of the abbey; and, lastly, the abbot even claimed the right as against all other parties of appointing their own prior studentium. Of course, the rest of the College indignantly repudiated the claim, and it is easy to see what constant conflict must have arisen from the division of authority. But, at any rate, in the fifteenth century Malmesbury appears to have been able to enforce its rights, and several of the Benedictine houses were reduced to the necessity

of recognising its position by suing for licenses to build.

John Giffarde spent his last days at Malmesbury, and a short while before his death he nominated a monk of Malmesbury to be Prior of Gloucester College in direct contravention of the agreement of 1290. He died at Malmesbury in June, 1299, and was buried in the abbey of that place.

CHAPTER II

SOURCES OF HISTORY-NUMBERS IN GLOUCESTER COLLEGE

THE MONASTERIES AND THE COLLEGE- CAMERE

AND ANCIENT BUILDINGS

THERE are a number of local circumstances which render the task of writing the history of Gloucester College a matter of the greatest difficulty. In the first place, unlike almost every other college in Oxford, Gloucester College has left no records of any kind. Not being a corporation, it had no muniments of title; not being a united whole, it had no register of members. Being isolated by position, one gets very few oblique hints as to its relations with the colleges and the University. Its members were drawn from about sixty-five abbeys and priories, and possibly an even greater number of cells. And there is every sign that even while living at Oxford the members of the college regarded themselves as belonging rather to the monastery from which they had proceeded, than to the college or university to which they belonged. Life at Oxford only represented a few years out of a whole lifetime devoted to their monasteries.

more a

To the University itself the College was collection of monks than a corporate whole. In the records of the University one may read that a Benedictine performed some service, or was guilty of some violence, but it is very seldom that we read of a Benedictine of Gloucester or Canterbury College as the case may be. Even in the register of degrees of the University this habit is maintained. One only knows that the name recorded is that of a Benedictine, and at best it is only a mere chance which enables a historian of Gloucester College to identify any particular Benedictine with his own college.

Thus it may be seen that one has to search for the history of Gloucester College not, as is the case with other colleges, in the records of the University, and that enormous mass of miscellaneous literature which has collected round the University of Oxford, but in the records of about sixty-five different monasteries scattered throughout England. It is as though the only authorities for the history of the colleges of Oxford at the present day were to be derived from the casual mention of them in the histories of the numberless schools from which they are recruited; and even in the records the notices of Gloucester College are extremely casual. One obtains something approaching to a full record that is to say, a full record of the relations of a particular monastery with the College-when, as sometimes happens, the chronicler was himself either a member of the College or a former prior, or for some local reason was led to take any special interest in the affairs of his monastery at Oxford.

Thus we obtain by far the fullest record of the