Arrival

It was high summer in 1221 when thirteen Dominican friars led by Gilbert of Fresney first glimpsed the English coast. They had been sent by their General Chapter, the sovereign body of this new international Order of Preachers, which its founder, St Dominic (d. 6 August 1221), had summoned to meet in Bologna at Pentecost that year. They had travelled for the latter part of the journey in the retinue of Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester and a royal councillor. His assistance to the friars then and later would be invaluable. On landing, the friars proceeded to Canterbury, where they presented themselves as preachers to Archbishop Stephen Langton. Piqued, one suspects, by that audacious claim to an episcopal duty, Langton challenged Gilbert to give the sermon that day where he himself was due to preach. He was sufficiently impressed that ‘for the rest of his life’ Langton ‘advanced by his grace and favour the Preaching Friars’ religious order and mission’ (religionem … et officium).Footnote ¹

The friars soon journeyed to London, where they arrived on 10 August, but no record survives of how they fared there. After no more than a couple of days, they pressed on to Oxford, where they arrived on the feast of the Assumption (15 August). Here they opened an oratory in honour of the Virgin Mary and a lecture hall, before lack of space led them to move two decades later to a site ‘granted to them by the king where they now dwell outside the walls’.Footnote ² Given the Dominicans’ other early foundations in university centres, Oxford and its nascent university had clearly been chosen in advance as the first foundation of the Order’s English Province (a group of religious houses and their members in a given territory under the leadership of a Provincial).Footnote ³

The Growth of the Province

The Dominicans soon established ‘priories’ (a religious house governed by a Prior) in other towns and cities across the British Isles. Charting this growth accurately is difficult, partly because when a house enters the historical record may not be its date of foundation, partly because some records may not be reliable, and partly because friars might be invited to enter a town before agreement was reached for the site of the foundation.Footnote ⁴ However, by 1232 the Dominicans had opened at least six or seven more in England at London, Winchester, York, Bristol, Exeter, Shrewsbury, and probably at Norwich; at least one in Scotland (possibly at Edinburgh); and at least two in Ireland (probably in Dublin and at Kilkenny). By the end of 1242 the Province contained at least nineteen houses in England, one in Wales, at least four or five in Scotland, while there were probably at most eight in Ireland. At least sixty-one houses had been established by 1260, seventy-nine by 1280. By the time the Black Death reached the British Isles in 1348–1349, there were eighty-nine Dominican houses (forty-eight in England, five in Wales, twelve in Scotland, and twenty-four in Ireland).Footnote ⁵

As these numbers indicate, the rate of growth varied over time and varied from region to region. So, too, did the number of friars who lived in and worked from them.Footnote ⁶ Most of the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish houses probably contained fewer friars than those in the larger, more prosperous English towns and cities. Probably typical of the houses in the small English towns was Chelmsford with thirty resident friars in April 1277; it is likely that the Irish mendicant houses usually contained far fewer men, so that ‘even the largest … seldom numbered more than thirty members’.Footnote ⁷ English priories in larger towns, and priories that came to function as provincial or general studia (centres of advanced theological or other study) housed larger numbers. Numbers at York are indicated by royal gifts of alms. Fifty friars received alms in 1299, sixty in 1307, and forty-eight in 1337.Footnote ⁸ The Priory at Norwich, England’s second largest city, was a similar size with fifty-three friars in 1326 and 1328.Footnote ⁹ London and Oxford came to stand out from the rest. Estimates of those living in the Ludgate Priory between July 1297 and February 1313 range between sixty-four and ninety-three friars.Footnote ¹⁰ There were probably ninety-six friars attached to the second Oxford priory in November 1305, when Edward I gave it £4 16s. for three days’ worth of food.Footnote ¹¹

If Oxford was the friars’ initial goal as a centre of theological training and recruitment, a question arises as to who and what forces shaped their subsequent expansion from Oxford. The first part of the chapter seeks to answer this question in terms of who supported new foundations and how the king in particular aided them. The second part of the chapter considers why these foundations were supported by looking at the friars’ life and ministry in relation to their supporters’ needs, first how they met them directly, and then the life within the cloister which enabled them to do so.

A Narrow Circle of Patrons

The Province’s expansion in England was slow when compared with the growth of the Franciscans. Only six Dominican priories are securely dated to the first decade, and the first Provincial Chapter was only held in 1230.Footnote ¹⁶ The Franciscans reached England in 1224, and immediately settled a few friars in Canterbury, London, and Oxford, and probably opened houses in Northampton, Norwich, and Cambridge within a further two years.Footnote ¹⁷ It has been estimated that they founded two houses a year across their first two decades.Footnote ¹⁸ One reason for the contrast lay with the Dominicans’ constitutions which stipulated that no house should contain fewer than twelve friars, that each such house should contain a friar competent to teach theology (a trained lector or lecturer), and that priories were only to be opened after approval by the Order in General Chapter.Footnote ¹⁹ However, it may also be explained by the friars’ initial dependence on a relatively small circle of early patrons, lay and ecclesiastical members of the Anglo-Norman nobility close to the crown, at a time when they were unheard of by many and unfamiliar to most of those who would later support them.

At London, the principal founder was Hubert de Burgh (ca. 1170–1243), the King’s Justiciar in England, who by late 1223 or 1224 had purchased a small plot of land for the friars outside the walls to the west of the city at Holborn close to the Fleet in the parish of St Andrew’s. Gifts by other donors permitted the gradual development of the site before the friars relocated to a much larger site within the city at Ludgate more than five decades later.Footnote ²⁰ Also in the mid-1220s Peter des Roches was purchasing houses at Winchester, the income from which had previously supported a hospital at Portsmouth. By Michaelmas 1226 the bishop had given the houses to the Dominicans, though it was probably sometime before they began to build their priory within the city walls which attracted a first gift of timbers from King Henry in 1235.Footnote ²¹ Meanwhile Henry had closely involved himself in the foundation of the York Dominican house. By 10 April 1227 he was instructing the sheriff to make over a site near the Micklegate to the friars which had been identified after he had earlier told Martin de Pateshull (one of his long-serving justices) to consult with the mayor over a suitable location. This was the Kings Toft, a small parcel of land belonging to the monarch with a chapel dedicated to the Magdalen.Footnote ²² An intramural site adjoining the cathedral close at Exeter suggests that the Dominicans’ establishment there was supported by its bishop, William Briwerre (Brewer), whose uncle, the baron of the same name, was ‘one of the second tier of ministers’ below De Burgh and Des Roches before his death in 1226.Footnote ²³ The nephew accompanied Des Roches on crusade in 1227. By 1232 work at Exeter was sufficiently advanced for the friars to obtain royal permission to quarry stone for the church, so Bishop Brewer may have supported the foundation before going abroad.Footnote ²⁴

The foundation at Carlisle is readily interpreted along the same lines. When the Franciscans and Dominicans arrived in the city in 1233 (the former in mid-August and the latter just over a month later), its bishop, Walter Mauclerc, was an exile who had recently fallen from royal favour. However, in the period when arrangements to welcome the friars would have been made, Mauclerc was still treasurer of the exchequer. He was thus close to the crown; and the appointment a year earlier of his nephew as Prior of the cathedral canons marks his grip on the city’s ecclesiastical life. Mauclerc’s grants to the Oxford Dominicans (probably after his return to royal favour in 1234) have already been noted, while he himself entered the Order at Oxford on resigning his see in June 1246. All of this points to his playing a decisive role in establishing the friars at Carlisle.Footnote ²⁵

The nobles identified so far were not necessarily the sole benefactors of these foundations. The construction and initial furnishing of a priory was generally the work of many donors over several decades, during which its precinct was often enlarged, either by further gifts or purchases by the friars. Nor was the possession of a site freehold: the Winchester friars paid an annual rent of 3s 5d for part of their site before 1258, when the king sanctioned a new arrangement.Footnote ²⁶ At Shrewsbury (where a house had opened by 1232) the friars gained an extension to their precinct in 1265 from the dean of St Mary’s in ‘frank almoin’ (free from secular obligation). However, they were they obliged to pray for their benefactors, while the grant was enabled by Andrew, lord of Wylileg in the Welsh borders, who made over to St Mary’s an annual rent of 6s 8d.Footnote ²⁷ Powerful donors persuaded others by their example. At Athenry in Ireland (where the house was perhaps founded in 1240 or 1241), the principal benefactor who gave the site and a substantial donation towards the building costs was Meiler de Bermingham. Meiler, a local Anglo-Norman lord, who had taken part in the invasion of Connacht led by the Irish Justiciar Richard de Burgh (Hubert’s nephew), was effectively founder of the walled town as well.Footnote ²⁸ However, the friars gratefully recorded how he also ‘asked his noble soldiers and other nobles as well as his squires’ to give the Dominicans the necessary ‘aid or means of relief to complete the works’ (daret … subsidium seu relevamen ad … opera peragenda).Footnote ²⁹

A Widening Circle of Patronage

The foundation of the first Dominican convent at Norwich fits a pattern of growth in ecclesiastical centres, but no evidence links it with the circle of patrons observed earlier. A local monk, Bartholomew, recorded the Dominican and Franciscan friars’ arrival in 1226. The Franciscans immediately opened a house, but it is not certain that the Dominicans did. Bartholomew says nothing of who initially supported them.Footnote ³⁰ In the early eighteenth century the antiquarian John Kirkpatrick (d. 1728) knew only that by 1250 the Dominicans had ‘obtained for themselves’ the core of their first site north of the river close to the ancient parish church of St John the Baptist over the Water. This was known because the friars had later attested that in 1254 they were given a plot of land (Olde Freres Yerde) by several donors including Thomas Gelham.Footnote ³¹ Another antiquarian, Francis Blomefield (d. 1752), stated that Gelham was the house’s founder who gave the Dominicans the parish church and rectory, and who later secured the king’s confirmation for this gift. An early repurposing of the former parish church for the Dominicans’ use would partly explain why they do not appear among the thirty-two houses of the Province that had benefitted from royal benefactions in the extant close, patent, and liberate rolls before 1272. The site was enlarged by later gifts from townsfolk over subsequent decades. Gelham’s role in the foundation remains unproven, but Norwich is probably an early example of foundations by local nobles less closely associated with the crown, and supported by townsfolk who valued the friars’ ministry.

Local nobles almost certainly founded the Bristol priory, which lay north of the castle on the far bank of the River Frome. One day in probably late August or September 1480, a Bristolian, William Worcestre, stepped into its church, recorded the prominent burials it contained, and obtained permission to record entries from the obit book, including one for ‘Matheus de Gurnay’ whom he noted as one of priory’s founders (‘vnius [sic] fundatorum fratris [sic] predicatorum’). He noted two further obits for members of this family: Anselm, whose body lay in the choir, and Sir Robert, whose heart was interred in the church. In the following century, another visitor to the town, John Leland (d. 1552), identified Maurice de Gaunt (ca. 1184–1230) as the priory’s founder.Footnote ³² While one or both authors might be mistaken, circumstantial evidence supports a joint foundation by Matthew de Gurney and Maurice de Gaunt at some point before 1230. The two wealthy families were related, so that Maurice de Gaunt had a half-sister Eva de Gournay, and Maurice was associated with Eva’s son Robert in the foundation of Gaunt’s Hospital at Bristol. It was this Robert and his son Anselm whose remains were buried in privileged positions at the Blackfriars. By the late 1220s Maurice, lord of Beverston, was not in the same circle as des Roches or Mauclerc, but was a trusted royal servant and itinerant justice. According to the Annals of Tewkesbury, Maurice was buried at his death in 1230 both in the Augustinian church at Bristol and in the town’s Dominican chapel.Footnote ³³ The appeal of Bristol to the friars, meanwhile, may have been in part its function as the major port connecting England with Ireland.

The First Irish and Scottish Houses

Anglo-Norman nobles are the likely founders of most early Dominican priories in Ireland. According to the Dominican Annals of Roscommon and the Franciscan Annals of Multyfarnham, the friars established their first priory in Ireland in 1224.Footnote ³⁴ The house was almost certainly at Dublin on the north bank of the Liffey next to the Cistercian abbey of St Mary’s. Bernadette Williams has canvassed the ‘strong possibility’ that William Marshal II (ca.1190–1231) persuaded the Cistercians to facilitate this foundation.Footnote ³⁵ The genealogy of William the Marshal I (d. 1219) and his descendants occupies a prominent place in the Annals composed by Pembridge (a fourteenth-century Dominican Prior of Dublin). Also relevant is the role played by one of the Marshal’s sons, either William Marshal II or his younger brother Richard (d. 1234), in establishing the Dominican priory at Kilkenny. In 1224, William Marshal II married Eleanor, the king’s younger sister, with the support of Hubert de Burgh, and became Justiciar of Ireland.Footnote ³⁶ The founder at Dublin would thus be from the same elite circle as the earliest houses in England with another foundation in a significant ecclesiastical centre, an archiepiscopal seat.

Bernadette Williams has warned against accepting uncritically the evidence from Sir James Ware, the seventeenth-century antiquarian, that as many as another five Dominican priories opened in Ireland by the end of 1231 (supposedly at Drogheda (1224), Kilkenny (1225), Waterford (1226), Limerick (1227), and Cork (1229)).Footnote ³⁷ Ware drew on a transcript of a medieval source which lists the foundation dates of the Irish priories before 1300 and the locations of its vicariate chapters up until 1347. The list prefaces the meagre extracts from the Dominican Annals of Trim in BL MS Add. 4789. The dates for several later foundations are wrong, but the primary difficulty lies in accepting that the English Province could grow quickly enough to enable so many formal foundations within its first decade while remaining obedient to the Order’s constitutions. Conversely, there may have been invitations for small numbers of friars to lodge in several strategic centres with an eye to making a formal priory at a later date. Dominicans would have been tempted at a later period to think of their foundations as dating back to such informal beginnings.

Anne-Julie Lafaye, who simply accepts Ware’s dates, has seen the speedy settlement in ‘six of the largest and richest towns on the island’ as something that could hardly be ‘left to chance’ and speculates that it was ‘pre-planned’. This, however, suggests too much on too slim an evidential base.Footnote ³⁸ Nonetheless, good evidence puts the foundation of a priory at Kilkenny sometime before 1234. The town was the Marshal family’s primary seat of residence in Ireland; and as Williams points out, a seventeenth-century source uncovered by Fr. Hugh Fenning O.P. names the ‘English Earl of Pembroke’ as founder of the convent there. Fenning identifies him with William Marshal II, while Williams favours the younger brother Richard. Pembridge claimed in his Annals that both William and Richard were buried in the choir there.Footnote ³⁹

In late February 1235 Henry III responded to a petition from the citizens of Waterford ‘commending their laudable purpose inspired by God as he believes … to build an edifice for the use of the Friars Preachers in a void place within the walls of their city’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This may be a more accurate pointer than Ware’s list to when the friars were established there. At Limerick, the house was founded by Donnchad Cairbrech Ua Briain, king of Thomond (d. 1242), who had been forced to accept Anglo-Norman control of the town, though King Edward I later considered his father as the priory’s founder.Footnote ⁴¹ All eight Irish houses mentioned thus far lay within the sphere of Anglo-Norman rule. Four were in the seats of a bishop (Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, and Cork), and three of these were strategic ports such as Drogheda. Close links between these cities and the crown were mirrored by the late thirteenth century in annual grants of royal alms to the Dominican houses. On 30 June 1285 King Edward I instructed his Irish justiciary and treasury to raise from twenty-five to thirty-five marks his annual grant to the Dominican friars of Dublin, Limerick, Waterford, Cork, and Drogheda.Footnote ⁴² Mullingar, though less closely linked to the crown, also lay within ‘a band of Anglo-Norman dominance’ under the lordship of the Petits.Footnote ⁴³ The value of the friars to their patrons in consolidating Anglo-Norman influence seems clearer in some cases than the value to the friars of opening a house in small and vulnerable colonial outposts, and this indicates their dependence on powerful benefactors.

In 1564, Br Andrew Leys, an eighty-year-old Scottish Dominican, told Sir William Sinclair that ‘In Sanct Dominicus tyme’ King Alexander II founded the Order’s houses at Berwick, Perth, Air, Sterling, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Inverness, and Elgin, and at Edinburgh gave them his manor for that purpose.Footnote ⁴⁴ While we cannot rely simply on what the Scottish friars then understood of their origins, other evidence supports the view that their earliest foundations were made by King Alexander II (1198–1249). He was associated with the Anglo-Norman elite in England through his marriage in 1221 to Joan, sister of Henry III, and the marriage that same year of Alexander’s sister Margaret to Hubert de Burgh. In the mid-thirteenth century, the Cistercians of Melrose added an entry to their earlier account of events in 1230 to note the friars’ arrival in Scotland.Footnote ⁴⁵ They did not name the house, traditionally held to be at Edinburgh, where a priory definitely existed by 1244, by which time there were also houses at Perth, Berwick, Ayr, and perhaps others.Footnote ⁴⁶ Alexander’s role as a leading patron at Perth is shown by a charter of 1241 in which he granted the church an annual gift of wax following its consecration the year before by Bishop David de Bernham of St Andrews.Footnote ⁴⁷ The following year he instructed officials at Ayr to give the friars there twenty pounds sterling each year as agreed when he had the church ‘dedicated’.Footnote ⁴⁸ His founding support at Berwick-upon-Tweed is indicated by a court document of 1329 which records payments made by the Camerarius, Robert of Peebles: the Friars Preachers of Berwick ‘received forty marks every year as donated by Alexander, King of Scotland’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Further Expansion

The years from 1242 to 1275 saw the establishment of most of the remaining houses in the medieval Province. Though we have few firm foundation dates, the number of houses roughly doubled. Only in Ireland would there be a significant wave of later foundations. The seventeenth-century list of Irish foundations rediscovered by the late Fr Hugh Fenning OP describes houses (at Galway, Kilmallock, Waterford, Clonmel, Cashel, and Dublin) as founded by the townsmen, while the houses at Cork and Drogheda are said to be founded by the citizens and in part by local nobles; as time went on this may have been increasingly what happened.Footnote ⁵⁰ While the Dominican archbishop at Cashel, David mac Cellaig (MacKelly), no doubt encouraged the erection of a house there in 1243, these entries on Fenning’s document indicate that the establishment of a priory was often a collaborative venture.Footnote ⁵¹

This joint endeavour can be glimpsed in the extant rolls recording grants by the crown. At Wilton, probably founded in the early 1240s, construction was aided by gifts of timber in the summer of 1245 from William de Longespée, Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, the Lady of Braybuf, and William Mauduit.Footnote ⁵² Maudit gave the house more oaks two years later, when they also received them from Roger de Sifrewast. As at Athenry, these are probably gifts from within a local circle of connected families and dependents.Footnote ⁵³ Collaborative support from a different quarter is revealed by a gift of ten oaks in 1246 from the Master of the Knights Templar in England for the Northampton house, which had been founded sometime before 1233.Footnote ⁵⁴

Varying Patterns: England

However, the patterns of expansion were very different in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. By 1241 the medieval Province had opened houses in at least eight English cathedral cities (Canterbury, Carlisle, Exeter, Lincoln, London, Norwich, Winchester, and York) and in some of the larger non-cathedral towns of England such as Bristol, Oxford, Gloucester, and Northampton. Of the other English cathedral cities, the medieval Province would open houses in only three: Chichester, Salisbury, and Worcester. Yet, the country had enough other prosperous and growing towns to support many new foundations. Recruitment was buoyant in places. William of Thetford, Prior of Oxford, wrote (probably in the early 1240s) to Bishop Torkesey of Hulme to say that his nephew had impressed the friars, and that ‘at Oxford, blessed be God, we have received as I believe forty novices this year’.Footnote ⁵⁵

What now shaped growth in England was largely opposition to the friars by religious houses whose income was threatened by their arrival. In some cases, the opposition only delayed matters. At Dunstable, the Augustinian canons’ opposition was overcome in 1259 by what the Augustinian chronicler termed the friars’ ‘utmost effort and sweet-talking’ (per maximam industriam et seductionem). This had resulted in the ‘king, queen, and certain great lords’ pressuring the canons to provide a suitable site. They took their revenge some twenty-seven years later when they purchased a plot adjacent to the priory, thereby pre-empting the enlargement of its precinct!Footnote ⁵⁶ In Hereford, opposition took the form of a coalition comprising the bishop, the cathedral clergy, and the Franciscans. The Dominicans initially hoped to placate them by moving from an intramural plot (obtained before July 1246 and for which they had royal support) to a suburban site outside the city; they also secured letters from Innocent IV to the cathedral chapter and bishop, Peter de Aigueblanche. The tactics failed. Workmen were excommunicated, and buildings at the new site torn down or set alight twice over the next decade. The affair rumbled on, and the legal dispute was only finally resolved in 1322, when the cathedral chapter agreed that the friars could build a priory in the northern suburb on land bounded by Frog Lane and Widemarsh Street, a plot offered to the friars three years earlier by King Edward II.Footnote ⁵⁷ Extant legal papers indicate the scandal caused by the case. The same underlying financial pressures led Dominicans to obstruct Franciscan foundations or expansion. When (in the late thirteenth century) the latter sought a more advantageous site at Exeter than they enjoyed previously, the bishop’s Dominican confessor, Peter Kenefield, warned him: ‘Lord, if you permit those friars to build their new house, we shall not be able to live.’Footnote ⁵⁸

Opposition was strong enough at times to prevent a foundation altogether. When Dominicans petitioned the papal legate Otto in June 1238 to open a house in Bury St Edmund’s, they were firmly rebuffed. Though land was given by the Countess of Oxford, a papal bull of April 1239 confirmed their exclusion from the town.Footnote ⁵⁹ Similar problems cropped up all over Europe, and the papacy intervened first in 1265, then again in 1268, to set minimum distances between priories and friaries within a town: originally over six hundred yards, later some three hundred yards (300 and 140 cannae).Footnote ⁶⁰

Varying Patterns: Scotland

In Scotland, the four houses definitely established by 1244 were not in an episcopal seat. The other houses definitely or probably founded by Alexander II include three in episcopal centres: at Glasgow (where the priory existed by 1246), at Elgin, and at Aberdeen. His other two foundations, at Inverness and Stirling, were in or near important burghs. Other cathedral sites, such as Brechin, Dunblane, and Whithorn, lacked the population to maintain mendicant communities without continual funding from the crown, though a friary opened at Wigtown near the end of the thirteenth century, ten miles from Whithorn’s cathedral abbey.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, there was only one more Scottish house by the end of that century, in the coastal burgh at Montrose, the foundation of which Scottish friars traditionally ascribed to Alan Durward (d. 1275), ally of Henry III and Justiciar of Scotland from 1244 to 1252 and from 1255 to 1257.Footnote ⁶² The indications are that only five medieval burghs had populations over one thousand: Berwick, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, and Perth.Footnote ⁶³ At St Andrews, a small house rather than a priory proper appears in the records in the mid-fifteenth century, and the cathedral’s Augustinian canons may previously have opposed the friars’ entry.

Varying Patterns: Wales

Medieval Wales was similarly characterised by the absence of large towns. It is thought that the largest town, Cardiff, had roughly two thousand inhabitants in the thirteenth century, while Carmarthen may have reached a similar size by the end of that century; others were much smaller.Footnote ⁶⁴ This explains the paucity of foundations, though friars were active in Wales from an early period: two, Philip and Richard (probably friars from Chester), witnessed a charter in 1236 whereby Gruffydd II ap Madog, prince of Powys Fadog in north Wales, confirmed gifts made by his father to the Cistercian abbey of Vale Crucis.Footnote ⁶⁵ Dominicans nonetheless established priories in towns dominated by a castle in English hands: in south Wales at Cardiff (by 1242), at Haverfordwest (by 1246), and at Brecon in mid-Wales (by 1291).Footnote ⁶⁶ In north Wales they built two: at the small cathedral city of Bangor (by 1251) and at Rhuddlan (probably in 1258).Footnote ⁶⁷

The southern houses were established in towns under English lordship. Cardiff castle was held by the Lord of Glamorgan, who from 1230 until his death in 1262 was Richard de Clare, 6th Earl of Gloucester. A grandson of William the Marshal, and a former ward of Hubert de Burgh and Peter des Roches, he had been married briefly as a teenager to Hubert’s daughter, Margaret. It is plausible to ascribe the friars’ advent in Cardiff to Richard’s support, and thereby to the same circle of lords who supported other early foundations.Footnote ⁶⁸ Likewise, at Haverfordwest the castle was held by the Marshals, who presumably supported the friars’ establishment in the town. In the later 1230s and the 1240s the earls were Gilbert Marshal (d. 1241) and Walter Marshal (d. 1245), sons of William the Marshal and Isabel de Clare.Footnote ⁶⁹ The house at Brecon lay in the contested Welsh borders, and the town had been set ablaze by Llywelyn ap Iorwerth in 1231; but the area remained under the control of its Anglo-Norman Marcher lords, who at times vied for its castle.Footnote ⁷⁰

In north Wales, however, it is suggested, though not proven, that the priories at Bangor (already a small town before the English conquests) and at Rhuddlan were founded by Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, who claimed sole rule of Gwynedd from 1255. Henry III strengthened the castle’s timber defences at Rhuddlan during his campaign in 1241, but Llywelyn soon controlled the region, and Rhuddlan perhaps only returned to English control in 1277. Anian (Einion), Bishop of St Asaph from 1268 and former Prior of Rhuddlan, was for some years the Prince’s emissary and a member of his council.Footnote ⁷¹

Varying Patterns: Ireland

The difficulty in determining the foundation dates of the Irish houses has already been noted. Several dates in Ware’s list are known to be wrong or do not agree with other sources.Footnote ⁷² However, this does not mean that the sequence of foundations is misrepresented, nor that the dates are far wrong. According to this list, the foundation at Cork was followed by a gap of eight years before the erection of Mullingar in 1237 and Athenry in 1241, after which there would be a further fifteen houses established by 1275: Cashel (1243), Tralee (1243), Newtonards (1244), Coleraine (1244), Sligo (1252), Strade (1252), Athy (1253), Roscommon (1253), Trim (1263), Arklow (1264), Rosbercon or Ross (1267), Youghal (1268), Lorrha (1269), Derry (1274), and Rathfran (1274). Only one more would be founded by the close of the century (at Kilmallock in 1291). Some of these dates are supported by other sources: the foundation at Rosbercon is given as 1267 in the so-called Chronicle of Ross and in the annals of John Clyn (‘Predicatores ceperunt locum de Ros’).Footnote ⁷³ The foundation at Trim is also dated to 1263 in a manuscript of Trinity College, Dublin.Footnote ⁷⁴

These foundations were nearly all located at or close to small towns within a (sometimes contested) sphere of Anglo-Norman colonisation: Newtonwards and Coleraine lay within an area of Anglo-Norman settlement since John de Courcy’s invasion of Ulster in 1177. Arklow was a fishing and trading port, but also a manorial centre for the Butlers, tenants-in-chief of the crown; later links between the family and the Dominican priory are indicated by the burial there in 1285 of Theobald Butler, nephew of Walter de Burgh, Earl of Ulster.Footnote ⁷⁵ By 1263, Trim was a market town and the caput or manorial centre of the lands held by the lord of Meath, Geoffrey de Geneville (or Joinville), who held the town’s castle for the crown.Footnote ⁷⁶ In 1308, Geoffrey, traditionally regarded as the founder of the priory, entered the Order there in his old age, and was buried there on his death six years later.Footnote ⁷⁷ Athy was a small town controlled by the Anglo-Normans who had built Woodstock castle at or soon after the end of the twelfth century. Tradition associates the foundation at Tralee with John fitz Thomas Fitzgerald, 1st Baron Desmond (d. 1261), described by one historian as ‘the leading colonist in Kerry’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Further north another member of the Geraldine family, Maurice Fitz Gerald, 2nd Lord of Offaly (d. 1257), the former royal Justiciar, founded the priory at Sligo only eight years after construction of the town’s castle in alliance with Feidlim Ó Conchobhair.Footnote ⁷⁹ At Strade the Province gained an existing monastic house when the lord of Athlethan took it from the Franciscans and gave it to the Dominicans at the instigation of Basilia, daughter of Meilor de Bermingham. According to seventeenth-century Franciscan historians, the house was destroyed by fire within a year or two (whether by accident or design is not recorded!).Footnote ⁸⁰

In these Anglo-Norman enclaves, the friars were part of how their patrons consolidated their dominance at a focal point where others could join them in expressing a shared piety; patrons fostered a culture familiar to them and to English émigrés among the townsfolk. It has been asserted of works initiated by John fitz Thomas at various places that ‘the monastery was as much a statement of colonial intent as was the castle’; that judgement applies equally well to the priories considered here.Footnote ⁸¹ Given the small size of most colonial settlements, it may be presumed first that the priories probably contained fewer friars than those in England (on which see further below), and that the Irish priories were more dependent on a small number of noble patrons.

The long-term survival of some houses depended on a different pattern of funding and ownership to that in England: by 1541, the friars at Trim not only had a four-acre orchard, garden, and cemetery, and a three-acre ‘close of pasture beside the wall of the house’, they also owned ‘seventy-two acres of land’.Footnote ⁸² At Mullingar, the Dominican friars were granted thirty acres of arable land at Kilbride in 1450 which they were to hold for twenty-one years. By the time of the suppression in 1540 they owned some sixty acres in total.Footnote ⁸³ It is unclear when such dependence on income from landed property developed; but it may reflect the nature of the original foundations in locations largely determined by the friars’ patrons.

Few foundations were made in districts outside effective or stable Anglo-Norman control. What is now the county of Roscommon was ‘a medieval frontier region’ with ‘a constantly shifting balance of power’ between the Uí Conchobair and the Anglo-Norman lords, where colonisation largely failed. The death of Cathal Crodberg in 1224 led to twelve years of warfare in the region. Under the political settlement effective from the mid-1230s, most of the district was left for decades under the control of the Ua Conchobair; and Feidlim Ó Conchobhair is named by Irish annalists as the founder during this period of the Roscommon priory. The town’s Anglo-Norman castle was not completed before 1269, and was burnt down in 1270 and 1272, while the Anglo-Norman burgh may only have been established with the construction of the castle. Feidlim was a godson of Maurice Fitz Gerald, and at times a political ally; in this context the foundation of the priory might be considered in part a claim to parity of standing articulated through ecclesiastical patronage.Footnote ⁸⁴ If the date given by Ware for the foundation at Derry is even roughly correct, the house (outside the old ecclesiastical centre) was established at a time when the Uí Domhnaill were a major power in the town and surrounding district. Domnall Óg Ó Domhnaill, the major chieftain in Donegal from 1258, was almost certainly the principal founder of the house, where he was buried in 1281.Footnote ⁸⁵

‘Ad Fabricam Ecclesie Sue’: The Shape of English Royal Patronage

Extant rolls (official records of royal grants and expenses) reveal how quickly, how strongly, and the manner in which King Henry III supported the erection of the Dominican houses in England. The few recorded gifts by the crown in the first decade of the Province’s history come in the latter part of the decade: the site at the York was granted in 1227, and there were three gifts of timber to the Oxford priory in 1229 and 1231.Footnote ⁸⁶ From then on, however, grants came thick and fast, primarily in the form of timber from the royal forests to facilitate construction. For example, in late May 1232, the friars at Shrewsbury were promised thirty tree-trunks (fusta) for building the church, to which was added a week later a further ten trees (robora) for heating and cooking (ad focum). They would take months to arrive (there was no sign of them by early August), but they would have provided a substantial part of the major timbers required (a later grant shows that the refectory at Northampton required at least sixty ‘cheverones’ (as rafters or scaffolding).Footnote ⁸⁷ A year later the Oxford friars were promised thirty oaks for the rafters and other timberwork of a new lecture hall.Footnote ⁸⁸ There were many smaller grants besides these large gifts, such as the six ‘good tree-trunks with all their offcuts’ given to the friars at Cambridge in the summer of 1244 for building their church.Footnote ⁸⁹ Such gifts were the easiest way for the king to assist in construction, though he had also to meet the costs of felling and transporting the timbers. In assessing the intrinsic value of these gifts, as well as their value by way of example to others, it has been estimated that construction of the ‘original permanent buildings’ at the Gloucester Blackfriars ‘required between 160 and 210 [large] oaks’, and that Henry III gave at least eighty-two across several decades, sixty-one from the Forest of Dean, a particular source of large trees.Footnote ⁹⁰

Henry occasionally helped with other materials for construction. At Exeter, for example, the king permitted the friars to quarry stone in 1232 for the church from a site beside the castle ditch.Footnote ⁹¹ In 1242 the friars at Shrewsbury were promised fifty loads of lime and two hundred cartloads of stone left over from work on the town walls. Another fifty loads of lime were donated in 1245.Footnote ⁹² Very rarely, the king or queen gave money towards the building costs. However, they made such gifts regularly (at least once or twice a year) over some thirteen years to the friars at Canterbury largely for the church.Footnote ⁹³ These totalled at least £343. Although there were occasional grants of money to other priories for building work (one hundred shillings given to the Winchester friars in 1239, and the ten pounds to the London friars in 1240),Footnote ⁹⁴ Canterbury was exceptional in this respect. A partial explanation is that the city contained one of the two principal royal mints, while its priory probably received few and relatively small grants of timber from the crown (they were promised twenty oaks in 1241, as well as three trunks for firewood).Footnote ⁹⁵

Although many Dominican priories benefitted from King Henry’s extensive benefactions, extant records indicate they did so unequally. Norwich’s late appearance as a recipient of royal gifts has already been noted. The Carlisle priory benefitted from several grants between 1234 and 1251: an adjacent plot of land; gifts of twenty oaks, ten oaks, and six oaks on different occasions; permission to remove a building and for a waterpipe; and a grant of wheat, barley, and oat grains. The Northampton priory received some eighteen grants between 1233 and 1252 which totalled one hundred and sixty-seven oaks plus four more grants of timber, foodstuffs, one hundred shillings for the church roofing, and forty marks to buy land on which to extend the church transepts. Several factors might account for these differences: the different needs of the houses; varying support from other benefactors; and, not least, the place of Northampton on the royal circuit. The king was at Northampton when he granted them fifteen oaks on 25 March 1235, when he gave five trunks to the Minorites and five to the Dominicans on 6 March 1236, and when he gave four trunks to each of them on 25 January 1252.Footnote ⁹⁶ The growing town was a centre of royal authority with a major castle which Henry further strengthened from 1248. The priory, close to the town centre, was a visible expression of royal piety and generosity alongside the castle’s manifestation of power.

Royal support took other forms beside grants towards the construction of churches and monasteries. We have already seen gifts of firewood to the Oxford house and money towards the ‘maintenance’ of the Canterbury friars. Here, too, there were strong disparities between the houses. Extant close rolls point to at least forty-seven grants of firewood in the years between 1227 and 1260.Footnote ⁹⁷ Of these, no less than eighteen were to the friars at Oxford, four or five to the London house, four to that in Bristol, four to that in Northampton, nine to the Winchester friars, two grants to the friars of Wilton, and one to the houses of Shrewsbury, Canterbury, York, Lincoln, and Cambridge. While some disparity is explicable in terms of the houses’ likely foundation dates, and some may be due to gaps in the extant record and to grants of timber for unspecified purposes, these factors cannot wholly explain a distinctive pattern of benefaction: between 1245 (by which date all these English houses had been founded as well as those at Gloucester, Stamford, Derby, Newcastle, Carlisle, Exeter, Norwich, and Chester) and 1260, the friars at Oxford received no less than eight grants of timber ‘ad focum suum’, Winchester seven, Northampton three, London three, Wilton two, while York, Cambridge, and Lincoln each received one. The great majority of grants were made either at the town in question or at manors close by, so what mattered most was probably ease of access to the king. What is more, eight of the grants made between 1246 and 1260 were matched by an equivalent gift to the Friars Minor of the town. In most of these cases, the king was staying at a nearby manor. The gifts were a ritual gesture of piety in response to the friars’ respectful attendance on the monarch

The king gave other alms in tandem to both the Dominicans and Franciscans. On 12 October 1233 Henry authorised payment of 38s 8d to his almoner, Brother Geoffrey, to feed the Oxford friars on the Friday after Michaelmas. Geoffrey was also paid for 350 yards of white cloth given to each order of friars, and for 100 pairs of shoes, the latter only for the Dominicans, as Franciscans were ideally barefoot.Footnote ⁹⁸ Similar grants of cloth or clothing to both sets of friars occasionally recur in later years, sometimes adapted to the number of friars in a given house: the twenty-five Preaching Friars at Newcastle-upon-Tyne had received 150 ells of white cloth by early March 1239 and 16 pairs of shoes (one ell was 45 inches), while the twenty-two Minorites at Hartlepool had received 88 ells of grey cloth.Footnote ⁹⁹ The king gave the Franciscans and Dominicans of London a Christmas gift in 1243 of 80 tunics (when the Preachers also received shoes).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At Winchester there appears to have been an annual grant for some six years of winter or other clothing for both groups of friars in the city.Footnote ¹⁰¹ While all these gifts of alms must be seen in the context of the king’s much wider and regular almsgiving to older religious houses and to the poor, and perhaps also in the context of his twice yearly grants of cloth to courtiers and servants, these gifts were of far greater practical significance to the mendicant friars than to the monks. Most of the latter already benefitted from bequests and gifts of land or other property over many generations, which brought in a stable income.Footnote ¹⁰² Henry’s gifts also set an example to be followed by his immediate successors.

Preaching at Home and Abroad

The friars’ preaching mission was exercised first in their churches, which were both designed and commonly expanded to facilitate this, while the friars could gather separately in the chancel or choir to sing the Divine Office. At Bristol William of Worcester paced out the nave in gressus (‘steps’ of twenty-two inches). It was fifty-eight steps in length by thirty-four in width (106 by 62 feet), with a narrower choir of forty-four by fourteen (81 by 26 feet). This was similar to the lengths of the nave and choir of the larger Franciscan church, which he measured as 64 and 54 gressus.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It is somewhat smaller in size than the second Norwich Blackfriars, where William measured the nave as seventy-five steps ‘usque pedem spacii campanilis’ (to the foot of the belfry area) by forty-one steps (or 126 feet by 70 feet), and the choir as seventy-six steps in length, a measurement which, as John Harvey notes, included the length of the belfry area.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Norwich, though, was probably one of the friars’ largest churches in one the country’s wealthiest cities. William doesn’t reveal whether the church as he found it at Bristol had been enlarged from its original size in the mid-thirteenth century, but such developments can be seen elsewhere and were not uncommon in Italian priory churches.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ They testify to the friars’ success in attracting local congregations. At Ludgate, the London friars first built in the late thirteenth century what would be the choir, and then constructed an aisled nave in the fourteenth century that measured 65 feet in width inside, to create a vast church with an internal length of 236 feet or 72 metres.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Other projects were on a smaller scale, but no less significant. In Chester, where the first friars were supported by the bishop and royal diplomat Alexander of Stainsby (d. 1238), the precinct probably contained a small chapel dedicated to St Nicholas. The subsequent Dominican church seems to have been built with the original building incorporated into the choir of a second larger church.Footnote ¹¹¹ In Beverley, excavations indicate that a south aisle, western galilee porch, and step were added in the fourteenth century to an original nave which was only 82 feet in length (ca. 25 metres), so not much longer than the choir which is estimated to have been 69 feet by 23 feet (21 by 7 metres). The new aisle ‘nearly doubled the public preaching area of the church’.Footnote ¹¹² At Kilkenny, a different way was found to increase the available space: a transept arm ‘about the same size as the original nave’.

Dominicans also preached in their churchyards or cemeteries within the monastic precinct, as at Cambridge where the friars’ ally and a papal legate, Cardinal William of Modena, preached before assembled notables in 1247.Footnote ¹¹³ In 1410, Roger Jaket desired in his will to be buried ‘in the churchyard of the Preaching Friars at Ludgate [in London], near the pulpit there’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Most priories occupied a far smaller area or precinct than the Benedictine and Augustinian abbeys or priories that already featured in the urban landscape of many English towns. Hinnebusch calculated the average size of a Dominican precinct in England at five or six acres.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In some places, a small precinct was unavoidable in a crowded townscape. At Beverley the friars occupied by 1240 a site that never extended beyond four and a half acres (1.8 hectares) on wet, low-lying land close to the minster and probably bounded on two sides by existing religious foundations.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Some precincts were even smaller: the house at Gloucester, erected on land that previously formed part of the outer bailey of the castle, was (at least to begin with) ‘possibly less than three acres in extent’; the precinct in York occupied about an acre at the dissolution (whereas St Mary’s abbey had a precinct of twelve acres).Footnote ¹¹⁷ Yet, the need for large spaces where the faithful could hear sermons and later be buried was probably a factor in several foundations’ later relocation. At Norwich King Edward I gave the Dominicans in 1307 the house south of the river which had previously belonged to the suppressed Friars of the Sack (though the Dominicans still retained their original site). The new site allowed for a preaching yard south of the nave with an outdoor pulpit.Footnote ¹¹⁸ A similar opportunity had arisen earlier at Berwick: a papal letter of July 1285 instructed the bishop of St Andrews to sell to the Dominicans the site previously occupied by the Friars of the Sack ‘as their own place is too far from the town for the people to come to confession and sermons, and for the friars to visit the sick’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The need to serve a larger congregation, both inside the church and outside in the cemetery, was a factor prompting the move to a larger site at Oxford and London. At Oxford the canons at St Frideswide’s had attempted to block the Dominicans from enlarging the chapel and creating a churchyard for burials by 1227.Footnote ¹²⁰ Work on the new priory perhaps began as early as 1236.Footnote ¹²¹ Though it would take decades to complete, enough had been done to enable the friars to move in formally on the feast of All Saints (1 November) in 1245.Footnote ¹²² It was probably this complex which led the monk and chronicler Matthew Paris to complain two years earlier of the friars’ ‘sumptuous and daily enlarged buildings’.Footnote ¹²³ Not far from the Southgate, the new precinct covered twenty-two acres of water meadows beside the Thames.Footnote ¹²⁴

In 1272 the English Dominican Robert Kilwardby, a former Regent Master of Theology at Oxford who had recently been re-elected as Provincial, was named as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Kilwardby soon used his influence to acquire properties on what became the friars’ new site at Ludgate in London, which bordered the Fleet to the west and the Thames to the south. Here the ruins of Castle Baynard and Montfichet’s Tower were pulled down, and the city wall was moved westwards in several stages. This was financed first by a royal grant to the mayor in 1279, allowing him to levy murage or duty on goods coming into the city for three years, and later by further murage granted in 1302. Some properties were donated by Thomas de Basing, but the redevelopment of the site still required considerable resources provided by the crown in addition to the proceeds from the eventual sale of the Holborn priory in 1286: Edward I transferred to the friars in January 1278 the revenues from the deodands (animals or objects forfeited in law and sold as a result of their role in causing someone’s death). These provided valuable income for three years. The king further pledged one thousand marks in December 1291, though not all was necessarily delivered. The eventual result was a precinct of something over eight acres (3.25 hectares), giving the friars twice the space available at Holborn.Footnote ¹²⁵

Dominicans might be invited to preach in or outside others’ churches, though after the Council of Vienne in 1311 (confirming the terms set out by the papal bull Super cathedram of 1300), they might only preach in parish churches with the permission of the parish priest or by mandate of the bishop, and had to be licensed by him to hear confessions.Footnote ¹²⁶ An abbey guesthouse was a welcome overnight stop for both Franciscans and Dominican friars, and at St Albans Abbey they enjoyed by 1247 accommodation just inside the gateway to, or within the gatehouse of, a recently completed courtyard.Footnote ¹²⁷ Though at a distance from other respected visitors to the abbey and from the monastic community, the friars had ready access to the city.

The preacher on tour was supported by newly developed aids in the form of small notebooks, collections of model sermons, and small-sized Bibles. New College MS 88 is a codex of 44 irregular quires (493 leaves), which measures 108 by 145 mm. A partially erased note indicates that the book was for the use of Robert Lemoyne, whom Siegfried Wenzel has described as a ‘prominent Oxford Dominican from the beginning of the fourteenth century (or even earlier) on to at least 1345.’ It contains what Wenzel has described as ‘preaching material’ mainly in Latin ‘that ranges from full sermons to shorter sermon outlines, schemata, notes, and exempla’ as well as a treatise on how to hear confessions, catechetical material, and a few other texts. Apart from Dominican feasts that reflect the book’s provenance, Wenzel noted ‘a marked concentration on major feasts and seasons that called for itinerant preaching: Christmas, Lent and Easter, Ascension and Pentecost, and feasts of the Blessed Virgin.’ A table at the back, and rubrics in the upper margin facilitated cross-referencing.Footnote ¹²⁸ Snatches of English verse amid Latin sermon notes on Luke 7:44–47 suggest the preacher’s desire to make his message easily understandable to townsfolk when preaching in the vernacular as well as to teach the more educated clergy.Footnote ¹²⁹

Hearing Confessions

Exhortation to confess sins followed by the hearing of confessions was a major if controversial element of the friars’ preaching, as it was seen to deflect alms away from parochial clergy. Matthew Paris related how in in 1235 a group of Dominicans and Franciscans had cited papal authority to hear the confessions of many parishioners ‘to the disadvantage of the secular clergy (in praejudicium presbiterorum)’.Footnote ¹³⁰ The early 1230s had seen crop failures and price rises that by 1234 tipped many over the brink into starvation; Roger of Wendover claimed that levels of almsgiving fell away; it must have been galling for impoverished parish clergy to lose income to the friars.Footnote ¹³¹ Opposition persisted. In 1350, the ‘conservator of the privileges of the Friars Preachers’, Bishop Edington of Winchester, responded to a complaint from the ‘prior and brethren of Chelmsford’ that the rector of Rayleigh, had injured their interests ‘concerning their faculties to hear confessions’.Footnote ¹³²

Just how central the hearing of confessions was to the Dominicans’ work may be gauged from the licensing of ten friars from the Beverley Priory as confessors by Archbishop Corbridge of York on 14 March 1301.Footnote ¹³³ Names such as Philip de Watton and Walter of Grimsby suggest that most were from Yorkshire or Lincolnshire families, and had either entered the Order at Beverley or at another house in the York visitation.Footnote ¹³⁴ The number of friars at Beverley has been estimated at thirty-three in 1299 and forty-two in 1310,Footnote ¹³⁵ some members of which would have been lay brothers, non-ordained junior friars, or infirm and elderly brethren; those licensed constituted a large proportion of the friars available for apostolic ministry. This was not atypical. At Stamford, where the priory held around forty friars in the early fourteenth century, no fewer than sixteen were licensed as confessors in 1301. At Exeter, where the Dominican priory probably also held a similar number of friars as that at Beverley, and probably had a similar composition of juniors, active ministers, and elderly, the local bishop licensed ten friars as confessors in 1341 or 1342.Footnote ¹³⁶

At Beverley, the friars would have heard confessions from some of the many pilgrims drawn to the town and its minster by the newly embellished shrine of St John of Beverley. Some of those licensed by Corbridge, however, no doubt exercised a wider apostolate. The archbishop was a diligent visitator of the parishes in his archdiocese; earlier practice elsewhere suggests that he may have been accompanied on occasion by Franciscan or Dominican friars. So close was the connection between the friars and episcopal visitation in the diocese of Lincoln that when its bishop Robert Grosseteste began close enquiries into the morals of his flock, Matthew Paris related that he had introduced them ‘at the instigation, so it is said, of the Friars Minor and Friars Preachers (ad suggestum, ut dicitur, Praedicatorum et Minorum)’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Grosseteste had written shortly after his consecration to the Dominican Provincial Alard requesting John of St Giles and Geoffrey of Clive for a year as ‘honest counsellors and active assistants’. He forcefully reiterated his request to the diffinitors at their York Provincial Chapter, when he also asked for a skilled canonist.Footnote ¹³⁸ At one point he applied directly to the Prior of Oxford, William of Thetford, for particular friars, only to learn that William could not move lectors assigned by the Provincial. The latter, however, agreed that once the Oxford house had hosted the Northampton friars, he would send the bishop two brothers, one to preach and another to hear confessions. Though the dating and sequence of letters is uncertain, another letter complains to the Provincial that he has failed to keep his promise, despite the bishop’s papal privilege allowing him two such assistants.Footnote ¹³⁹ Though Grosseteste’s wish was not met as quickly as he would like, and the friars who assisted him were changed more often than he would like, a letter of perhaps 1242 shows that two Dominicans were normally assigned to his household.

Grosseteste had likewise sought the help of the Franciscans; and he had complained to his archdeacons of priests who prevented either Order of friars from preaching in their parishes and from hearing confessions.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ A statement which he drew up for the pope in 1250 relates how he then methodically visitated each archdeaconry and rural deanery, having instructed the clergy and laity to assemble separately. While he normally preached to the clergy and later confirmed the children, a Franciscan or Dominican preached to the laity, and four friars were deputed to hear confessions. Grosseteste was exceptionally diligent, but not unique in this respect.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Grosseteste’s close friend, the Franciscan Adam Marsh, assisted Archbishop Boniface of Savoy on his visitation of the Canterbury archdiocese in 1249.Footnote ¹⁴² It was said of Archbishop Edmund of Abingdon (consecrated in 1234, died 1240) that there were always Dominicans among his household advisors.Footnote ¹⁴³ Ralph Bocking, Dominican confessor and biographer to Richard Wych, bishop of Chichester from 1244 to 1253, related that while Richard regularly preached in the ‘boroughs or townships’ he visited, he ‘sometimes did so through the Friars Preachers or Friars Minor’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ At Raphoe in the north-west of Ireland the Dominican bishop Máel Pátraic Ó Scannail OP (or Patrick O’Scanlan) received papal backing in the form of a letter to the Dominican Vicar-General of Ireland in 1256 requesting two ‘prudent and discerning’ friars as his socii or companions. They were to assist him by ‘propounding the word of God’ and by the ‘salutary advice’ they would offer, in combatting local marriage practices and religious customs which Bishop Ó Scannail considered idolatrous.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Dominican friars were often given specific roles or faculties as confessors. A Truro friar, Roger Tyrel, was licensed in 1355 as a penitentiary for Cornish speakers; and another, Richard de Ponte, had been licensed in 1328 to hear confessions in the remote Scilly Isles.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Elsewhere, Richard de Guldeforde, a friar at the Guildford Blackfriars, was licenced in 1346 to hear confessions from those in the archdeaconry of Surrey who wished to confess sins otherwise reserved to the bishop, to absolve them and impose a suitable penance.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Similarly, confessors were appointed to nunneries: in 1319 Bishop Walter de Stapeldon of Exeter appointed both a Franciscan and Dominican as confessors to the Benedictine nuns of Polsloe, in what is now a suburb of the city.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The same pattern of joint appointments is evident elsewhere: Archbishop Melton of York had licensed the year before both Robert de Winteringham OFM and William de Lutton OP as confessors to the nuns at Wilberfoss.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Matthew Paris alleged in his Chronicon for 1246 that the friars had touted their superior qualifications as confessors among ‘devout individuals’ (viros religiosos), and that as a result, ‘many, but especially nobles and their wives’ sought out Dominican confessors, spurning their own priests and senior clergy.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ By the early fourteenth century a bishop often appointed confessors for specific noblemen and women, especially married couples. On 3 November 1318, Archbishop Melton of York permitted Sir John de Segrave and his wife, Christiana, to approach William de Drayton OP as their confessor.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Nearly thirty years later, the archbishop’s successor, William Zouche, authorised Friar John de Comston or Compston to hear the confessions of Sir John de Haryngton and his wife.Footnote ¹⁵² We should probably infer that the families concerned were patrons of local houses or had similar ties to the Order: John Hastings, Earl of Pembroke, requested in his will of Palm Sunday 1374, not only burial ‘in the quire before the great altar of the Monastery of the Friars Preachers of Hereford’, but also revealed that a witness to the will, Alexander Bache OP (future bishop of St Asaph), was his confessor.Footnote ¹⁵³ Such burials may be indicative of a patronal relationship. Likewise, James Audley (d. 1386), the 2nd Baron Audley, whose principal seat was in Staffordshire, but who also held the barony of Barnstaple, had a Dominican confessor, William de Chadle. If Audley died in the West Country, he requested burial in the Dominican church at Exeter.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Some bishops also appointed Dominicans to act as their personal confessors; we have already seen that at Exeter Peter Kenefield apparently acted in this capacity for Bishop Peter Quinel or Quivel, who governed the diocese from 1280 to 1291. Ralph Bocking OP was confessor to St Richard of Chichester.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

‘Fishers not of Men but of Money’? – Preaching the Crusades

Before we examine the preachers’ relationship to the crown as confessors, and much more, we should look at the friars’ other, more specialised preaching ministry. Matthew Paris repeatedly recorded the role played by Dominicans and Franciscans in preaching the crusade in chronicle entries for 1235, 1236, 1239, 1241, 1248, and 1249. An entry for 1239 shows his conviction that they were papal tools to extract money from the faithful. According to an entry in 1249, the friars first preached at spots previously allotted to them and advertised to the populace. Friars then received the vows of those who took the cross (regardless, according to Paris, of their suitability to fight). Either then or not much later, they dispensed many of these in return for whatever sums they could get. They were, in Paris’ eyes, ‘unwilling fishers not of men but of money’, papal ‘tax-collectors’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Yet, the practice of commuting the vow was widely accepted. The collected sums were deposited in the local Dominican priory, or some other religious house. Henry III allowed the Dominicans at Haverford to take fifteen marks towards the relocation of their church from the collection after they had ‘laboured diligently in the business of the Cross by preaching’. A letter of 1266 to the nuncio, Master Sinicius, reveals that he was to collect from Whithorn Priory the thirty-six marks ‘collected for the crusade in Scotland by Yvo, of the order of Friars Preachers of Ayr and deposited there’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

What gave Paris’ criticism further bite was that after 1240 one call to crusade was to be a war against the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, though money was also sought for the relief of Constantinople.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Even worse for the friars was the papal call for a crusade against Conrad IV of Germany (Frederick’s son) in Brabant and Flanders. This brought down on French Franciscan and Dominican houses the wrath of the French nobility who had been their major benefactors and patrons.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Nonetheless, many who made a crusading vow intended to carry it out. Paris judged that most of the nobles who laid siege to Aachen in 1248 had been signed up by Preachers or Minorites.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Twelve years earlier a Dominican had preached the cross at Winchester in the presence of the king and his court, when Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall, and other magnates took the cross.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Richard duly led a host of knights in 1240 on the Barons’ Crusade to the Holy Land.

The organisation of crusade preaching required the collaboration of crown, Church, and the friars’ Provincials or Provincial Vicars, though different sources privileged specific elements in the story. The Annals of Tewkesbury record how in 1252 the pope ordered the Dominicans and Franciscans to preach a crusade.Footnote ¹⁶² However, the close rolls reveal that in March 1252 the English king required the English Provincials of both orders to send to London a sufficient number of friars suitable for the task. In late May, Henry was writing to the archbishops of York and Canterbury, and to the bishops of Hereford, Ely, Durham, and Norwich instructing them to appoint Franciscans, Dominicans, and ‘other suitable men’ as crusade preachers.Footnote ¹⁶³ In December 1263 the pope authorised his legate Guy, Bishop of Sabina, to conscript as assistants in England Franciscans, Dominicans, and other male religious. Bishops assigned friars to preach in a certain place on a certain day. Thus, instructions from John le Romeyn (Archbishop of York from 1286 to 1296) to the Franciscan Warden of their York Friary in 1291 specify the locations where Franciscan or Dominican friars were to preach the crusade on the Feast of the Holy Cross that year. Three York Dominicans were to preach at Otley, Skipton-in-Craven, and Leeds; three from Lancaster were to preach there, at Kendal, and Lonsdale. Likewise, three friars from Beverley were assigned to preach at Preston in Holderness, or Hedon; at Ravenser on the Humber; and Le Wyk (Hull); two Scarborough Dominicans were to preach there and at Pickering. The Yarm house covered Yarm, Alverton, and Tresk; two friars from Pontefract covered the town itself and Wakefield.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

In the Service of the Crown: Royal Confessors

In seeking a Dominican confessor, the nobility followed royal example. The Lanercost Chronicle told how ‘Friar John of Darlington, of the Order of Preachers, confessor of the late King Henry, was appointed collector of tithes in the realm of England by papal authority … . The same was afterwards made Archbishop of Dublin by papal appointment.’Footnote ¹⁶⁵ As that suggests, however, a monarch needed a confessor adept at understanding political intricacies if not intrigue. Royal confessors thus typically functioned as advisors and Darlington was not the first Dominican to have the latter role: John of St Giles had been called to Henry’s council in 1239, but seemingly remained attached to the household of Bishop Grosseteste.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ A string of entries in the extant liberate rolls for April and May 1256 make plain that Darlington was by then a trusted advisor accompanied at least by a socius, the fellow-friar who normally accompanied a preacher on his travels. An entry for 25 April authorised payment to Master Alan the cook of £4 3s. 3d. to cover bills for cloth and other items needed by Darlington and other Dominicans attending (obsequencium) on the king. A week later came another larger payment for three ‘palfreys, saddles, capes, and other small matters of harness bought for brother John de Derlingeton and his companion’. The value which Henry set on Darlington’s service is then revealed by his gift at the end of that month of fifteen marks for Darlington to buy a manuscript (scripturam).Footnote ¹⁶⁷ As confessor and advisor, Darlington formed part of the court retinue accompanying the king on his travels, and by 1267 had a chamber assigned to his use at Winchester castle.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ When the Mad Parliament met at the Oxford Blackfriars in June 1258, Darlington was one of Henry’s supporters on the council; and when Henry was abroad in 1259–1260, Darlington acted as a trusted go-between carrying messages between Henry and Edward.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Henry’s immediate successors were likewise served by Dominican confessors who were also trusted advisors. An entry in the Close Rolls for 4 April 1304 describes a letter sent from King Edward I to the papal legate concerning the promotion to the rank of Cardinal of ‘Brother Walter de Wynterburn, the king’s confessor’: although ‘the king had it greatly at heart that Walter should remain continually at his side’, he bid the bishop ‘to thank the pope on his behalf in such way as his discretion shall deem most suitable’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Winterborne (as he is generally named by modern scholars) had probably served in this capacity for at least some seven years previously: the rolls for this period are studded with entries of royal gifts made ‘on the information’ which he supplied.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Many record gifts to Dominican priories, for which Winterborne was an invaluable means of access to royal support, while the support may also show how Edward valued his confessor as a Dominican and not simply as a wise counsellor. Winterborne’s successor was Luke de Wodeford OP, named as the king’s confessor in the patent rolls for February 1306.Footnote ¹⁷² He reappears as Edward II’s confessor in the close rolls from October 1316 to August 1318, when he appears to have been one of several advisors charged with finding places and pensions for long-serving staff in the royal household at various religious houses: the king is recorded as acting on Wodeford’s information some sixteen times during this period.Footnote ¹⁷³ In the meantime two other friars also acted in this capacity for the monarch: John de Lenham and his socius John de Warfeld.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ These friars continued to assist their brethren to benefit from royal liberality; and Lenham at least was given a wider brief on occasion: in July 1310 he and the abbot of Leicester were sent on business to the East Midlands.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The later confessors can be traced through the Wardrobe accounts, but their fewer appearances in the rolls may indicate their limited influence. More generally, Edward II’s regard for the Dominicans, and his favour towards them can be seen in his founding a priory at King’s Langley, adjacent to the royal palace in 1308. The body of Piers Gaveston, Edward’s favourite, was buried here at Christmas 1314 after it had lain for two years at the Oxford Blackfriars.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Royal Envoys

As suggested by Lenham’s journey to the Midlands, the friars often served as royal envoys, whether as messengers or negotiators. Matthew Paris in an entry under the year 1239 noted the role of Franciscans and Dominicans by that date as ‘the advisors and special envoys of kings’ (regum consiliiarii et nuntii speciales).Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Colman Ó Clabaigh has ably detailed how senior Dominican friars in Ireland served the English crown in this regard. Philip of Slane (‘sworn of the king’s council of Ireland’ by 1319 and bishop of Cork from 1321) was an envoy to Irish lords in Munster in 1316 during the invasion of Ireland by Edward Bruce.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Richard McCormogan, the Prior of Dublin who negotiated with the O’Tooles of Wicklow in 1331, was one of several such envoys from the Dublin convent during the 1330s.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ For the individuals concerned, it could involve a long, onerous journey: ‘Nicholas de Wysebech, of the Order of Preachers’ was granted safe conduct for ‘going to the Court of Rome on business of the king’ on both 20 March 1317 and 8 January 1318. If, as is possible, there were not two separate but one delayed journey, Nicholas was nonetheless absent on royal business for months at a time.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

English Dominican Bishops

Twenty or so Dominicans were elected or otherwise appointed as bishops in the British Isles with the English or the Scottish monarch’s approval during the thirteenth century, most to sees on the periphery of royal power where their learning enabled them to promote the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Nineteen were members of the Province. At least one further member of the Province, William de Fresney, was appointed to a diocese outside the British Isles (at Rages or Edessa). Of the twenty appointees (not all of whom took up office), fourteen were elected or provided to Irish dioceses, four to Scottish dioceses, one to a Welsh diocese, and only one to an English diocese.Footnote ¹⁸² Though eight were nominated to archbishoprics, four of these were to the archbishopric of Armagh, a see which (like Cashel) lay in the Anglo-Norman and Irish borderlands, and of these four only one was an Irish friar. By contrast, Irish friars were provided to the minor and impoverished Irish bishoprics in the west of Ireland: Ardfert, Cloyne, Killala, Lismore, and Raphoe.

There are occasional hints of a friar’s relationship to the dynastic clan or families of his Irish diocese. When Muiris mac Néill Ó Conchobair OP (or Maurice MacNéill O’Connor) became bishop of Elphin in 1266, five men with that surname had already served as bishop of Elphin since 1206. It is plausible to think that one reason for Muiris’ election was his membership of a leading Connacht sept. Old patterns of dynastic patronage were compatible with support for contemporary religious reform. As Bishop Tommaltach Ua Conchobair had promoted the reforms led by Lorcán Ua Tuathail, the archbishop of Dublin, at the beginning of the century, so Muiris had been attracted to the life and ministry of the mendicants.Footnote ¹⁸³

By contrast, two Dominican Englishmen were appointed as archbishops of Dublin by the pope, who in each case chose a trusted royal servant probably after representation from Edward I.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Neither reached their diocese. John of Darlington was consecrated in August 1279, but died en route to Dublin in 1284. William Hothum OP, a former Provincial, respected theologian, and counsellor of Edward I, was appointed to Dublin in 1296, but died two years later in Dijon.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Their appointments measure the close trust of the king for these advisors.

There are significant similarities to the Irish appointments when we look at appointments in Scotland and Wales. Clement, Bishop of Dunblane in Scotland from 1233 until his death in 1256 or 1258, is the earliest friar of the Province known to have become a bishop. The diocese was so poor that the cathedral church he founded was more like a rural chapel and the liturgy could not be celebrated more than three times a week. Its revenues, Clement informed the pope, were inadequate to support him for more than half the year. Nonetheless, Clement restored both his church and its finances with papal support. He enjoyed a relationship to the Scottish crown neither as remote as that of his Irish counterparts to the English crown, nor as intimate as those of Darlington and Hothum. He extended the power of the Scottish crown in Argyll, the diocese of which came under his jurisdiction in 1241; and he was present on the island of Kerrera at the deathbed of King Alexander II in July 1249. Yet royal charters show that he was not among that king’s most frequent or intimate advisors.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Other Dominicans likewise held minor Scottish sees. Two were successively bishops of the impoverished diocese of Argyll (confusingly styled on occasion bishops of Lismore): Laurence de Ergardia from 1263 or 1264 to 1299, and a certain Andrew from 1300 or 1301; the third, William Comyn OP (or Cumyn, or de Kilconcath), was bishop of Brechin from 1275 to sometime in the 1290s. Both Laurence and William were Scots who probably belonged to powerful local families.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In north Wales, Anian de Nannau (or Einion), a native Welshman and former Prior of Rhuddlan, served as bishop of St Asaph from 1268 to 1293. The see, which commanded few resources, lay in borderlands to which both the Welsh prince Llywelyn ap Gruffydd and the English kings laid claim. Anian was at times their go-between, at other times a victim of their struggle for power.

Only one member of the Province was appointed as bishop of an English see before 1300: Robert Kilwardby. This Oxford philosopher and theologian had been elected as Provincial first in 1261 and again in 1272. That same year he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by the pope after a disputed election and consecrated in 1273. However, Kilwardby did not retain his see for long; he resigned it in 1278 when the pope named him as Cardinal of Porto and Santa Sabina, and Robert died a year later in Viterbo. Kilwardby’s appointment partly resembles that of Darlington and Hothum as a major religious superior and theologian who had gained the king’s confidence. It also resembles the later papal appointments of two brothers, Walter and Roland Jorz OP to Armagh. Clement V appointed Walter to the see of Armagh in 1307. Brother of Cardinal Thomas Jorz, another English Dominican who had enjoyed the favour of Edward I, Walter failed to follow the procedure agreed by the crown for such appointments, and was initially fined £1,000 by Edward II, though this was later waived. Walter is thought to have played a part in securing the repeal in 1311 of a parliamentary measure taken the previous year that had banned the reception of native Irish into any religious Order in the country, a measure which responded largely to racial divisions within the Franciscans. He resigned the see in 1311 only to be succeeded by Roland.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

Thirteenth-century Dominicans were thus usually appointed to Irish, Scottish, and Welsh sees with limited financial resources. These sees did not give their occupants significant standing or patronage at the English or Scottish court, which meant that elections or appointments were subject to less local pressure from would-be candidates among the Anglo-Norman nobility, from the respective crowns, or from the royal Justiciar in Ireland.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ A similar pattern marks the appointment of Franciscans to sees in the British Isles.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Many of these early bishops, though by no means all, were native to the country if not the locality in which they ministered, and some may be suspected of belonging to dynasties that had exercised significant local power independently of their Anglo-Norman overlords or would-be overlords. They sought to advance church reforms, while operating within both local clan systems and a feudal system whereby a bishop held the temporalities or feudal lands of the diocese as tenant-in-chief from the king.

Outside the patterns so far traced lies the case of William de Fresney, who was consecrated at the papal court by Urban IV in 1263, but whose archdiocese of Rages or Edessa (modern-day Urfa) was determined by the Latin Patriarch of Antioch. His story partly resembles that of two other Dominican friars, who were perhaps members of the Province: William, bishop of Tortosa (modern-day Tartus in Syria), who visited England in 1249 in search of his family near Reading; and Geoffrey, bishop of Hebron, who acted as vicar for the Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem in probably the early 1280s.Footnote ¹⁹¹ No evidence suggests that Fresney ever visited Edessa; instead he functioned in England much as a modern suffragan or auxiliary bishop would act on behalf of the diocesan bishop. In April 1266 he consecrated Roger Skirling (or Skerning) as the new bishop of Norwich at St Paul’s in London. Twenty years later he hallowed the Carmelite cemetery at Lynn at the request of Skirling’s successor at Norwich, William Middleton. Unlike a modern auxiliary, he was at times a royal advisor, entrusted in 1266 with the (failed) mission of escorting rebel barons from Kenilworth Castle to treat with King Henry III during the rebellion. Archbishop Walter Jorz likewise spent some of his last years in Lincoln as an auxiliary to its bishop, and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries English Dominicans commonly acted as suffragans in England far from their titular see.

Dominican Life within the Precinct

To meet the needs of their supporters required the friars first to have a certain religious identity or lifestyle, one which therefore had much in common to that found in most houses of regular canons. However, it also required them to have a specialised training, and, as we shall see in the final part of this chapter, that made a difference to how their lives and houses were organised.

As mentioned earlier, the friars organised their buildings within a precinct which might also contain orchards and gardens serving the kitchens and infirmary. This articulated and reinforced their separation as religious committed to poverty, chastity, and obedience, It was common practice to enclose the precinct by a wall, but this might be delayed where the friars still hoped to expand their grounds: at Norwich the friars apparently only walled in the precinct of their first site north of the river in 1280.Footnote ¹⁹² To protect or enlarge these precincts, the friars often petitioned successfully for existing lanes to be enclosed, such as Satires Lane in Gloucester, or re-routed as happened at Ilchester and Shrewsbury. In the latter instance the king instructed his sheriff Peter de Montfort and several others on 23 July 1258 to stop up and divert a lane that ran beside the friars’ church in the town as it proved too noisy during heavy rainfall!Footnote ¹⁹³ Precincts, however, were rarely quiet places during the day, as they were also building-sites for many decades after a foundation was first made. Palmer reckoned that it took some sixty-seven years to complete the complex of buildings at Northampton, with the refectory finished in 1236, the school in 1258, and the church not complete before 1286.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

Like other vowed religious men, the friars sang the Divine Offices in choir and attended or celebrated Mass. By the second half of the thirteenth century a distinctive rite and plainchant had developed in the Order which was universally adopted soon after 1254, when the General Chapter in Budapest instructed Humbert of Romans, the new Master General, to establish a definitive series of texts now held at Santa Sabina in Rome (MS XIV L. 1). These were completed by 1259, and the English houses would have conformed their practice (no doubt at varying speeds) with the official versions. A compendium of twelve such books has survived from ca. 1260 (BL Add 23935) which the Master perhaps took with him when he travelled to different priories for a General Chapter or on other business, and from which corrections could be made to local texts.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ This did not preclude the celebration of local saints: one mid-fifteenth century collectar or book of collects (CUL Add. 2770) probably comes from the Dunstable Blackfriars as its calendar includes the feast of a little-known hermit venerated in the town’s Augustinian priory.Footnote ¹⁹⁶

Again, like most religious, most friars normally ate together in silence in a refectory while listening to a spiritual reading. The Canterbury refectory still shows traces of the reader’s raised pulpit, five feet square, recessed in the middle of the west wall and originally reached by a stair within the wall.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Excavations at Cork reveal a similar arrangement in the north wall of the original refectory there, though the ‘narrow flight of mural steps’ was blocked up when a higher floor level probably made them unnecessary.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ What was read during meals came from the Bible and other edifying texts according to the liturgical calendar such as the Lives of the saints – Humbert of Romans’ Legenda maior of St Dominic, composed in 1255–1256, was part of a lectionary for use in the refectory and elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The accomplished illuminator of manuscripts at Oxford, William de Brailes, illustrated between 1234 and perhaps 1240 a small Bible (measuring 167 by 116 mm). It also contained a number of Masses, including two for St Dominic, the only saint so treated. Seemingly commissioned by a wealthy patron for a friar to carry on his travels, or by a wealthy entrant to the cloister such as Bishop Mauclerc, the book was later annotated for use in the refectory.Footnote ²⁰⁰

John Bromyard, a friar at Hereford during the first half of the fourteenth century, observed in his huge Summa Praedicantium that it was somewhat ‘unsuitable for a man to preach for the church when he proclaims the poverty-stricken Christ with a corpulent belly and rubicund cheeks’.Footnote ²⁰¹ On the other hand, as Bishop Robert Grosseteste reminded one Dominican, ‘Three things are necessary for temporal well-being: food, sleep and jest.’Footnote ²⁰² That raises questions as to just what the friars ate and how often they sat down to a meal, perhaps on stone benches round the walls with their feet resting on a stone foot-pace, as at Cork.Footnote ²⁰³ Their diet varied according to the liturgical calendar, when the friars feasted on solemnities and fasted in some fashion at other set times. For much of the year they ate twice daily, but during their long penitential season from the feast of the Holy Cross on 14 September to Easter they ate together only once a day (Sundays and feast days excepted). Their diet conformed to the wider norms of religious life. The healthy were expected to abstain from meat, whether inside the priory or as a guest elsewhere, but meat dishes were prepared for the sick (preferably in a separate kitchen, where the infirmary cook was meant to ensure that bird feathers and animal skins didn’t go to waste but were set aside for use elsewhere), for guests, and perhaps some lay staff.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Dispensations could also be granted by superiors for friars who returned to the house as weary travellers and others.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Excavations at Beverley show that the friars ate large amounts of fish, as might be expected, but some at least also enjoyed poultry and red-meat dishes. Meat in general ‘was more prominent among later food remains’, but ‘rarely included the hunted game available to the upper echelons of local society’.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Likewise, excavations at Stirling indicate a varied diet that included not only locally grown fruits, berries, and hazelnuts, but also imported dried figs and (at least for some) occasional meat dishes (principally from cattle or sheep butchered on site).Footnote ²⁰⁷

While at Bristol in January 1285, King Edward wanted to know why the town’s Dominicans and Franciscans were not receiving the full quota of fish from the port which had been granted by the crown: two conger eels; four mulvels (or fresh cod); eight hake, haddock, or plaice; and four skate, depending on the catch.Footnote ²⁰⁸ The Dominicans in Kilkenny eventually gained fisheries on the River Nore; they would own a salmon weir at Sligo; and at Cork they were granted half of what was caught from a pool and weir on the River Lee; such grants were a common benefaction to mendicant houses generally.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Fish was particularly important during Lent. On 12 February 1260 Henry III instructed his ministers to buy herrings as Lenten alms to poor religious houses in accordance with his usual practice: two thousand were given to the London Blackfriars. The following Lent Henry gave the London Blackfriars 40s. to buy the herrings. Six years later he waived the tolls the Warwick Dominicans would otherwise have paid in bringing herring and other foodstuffs across from Norwich.Footnote ²¹⁰ We should imagine a similar traffic serving the kitchens and stores of other inland houses. Gifts offer a window onto other aspects of the friars’ diet. Like other religious they received pittances – donations for additional dishes at table in return for prayers, often for the departed: Bishop Thomas Bytton left the friars at Exeter twenty shillings as a pittance in 1310 among other bequests.Footnote ²¹¹ Gifts of wheat, barley, and oats would provide bread, beer, and porridge.Footnote ²¹² The eighteen cows which Thomas de Bermingham gave the friars at Athenry in 1488 would provide milk, butter, and perhaps cheese, and point towards the different pattern of land ownership for the Irish priories suggested above.Footnote ²¹³

Like other religious, most friars retired to a common dormitory to sleep. However, since the Order’s inception the Dominicans had privileged the place of study in preparation for preaching and teaching, and the English friars would soon have read in the Libellus by Jordan of Saxony (prepared for publication in 1233) how in the Order’s first house at Toulouse there had been cells suitable for studying and sleeping (‘cellas … ad studendum et dormiendum desuper satis aptas’).Footnote ²¹⁴ So, English friars who were considered good students and teachers (lectors) might have a dedicated space within the dormitory but close to a window and partially closed off from the rest of the room where they could study without disturbing their brethren. This was not necessarily furnished with a bed (though the Order’s legislation allowed for such), but was in some cases more like a carrel. The upper floor of the south range at Gloucester, constructed in the second half of the thirteenth century, measured eighty feet by twenty-two feet internally, but the long walls were lined with up to thirteen recessed cubicles each lit by a small square-headed window and partitioned off by stone slabs. Mortices suggest that wooden panels once extended from these to enclose a larger cell. At Bristol the southern wall was originally pierced by eighteen similar windows, while fifteen lancet windows pierced the north wall, and this with other evidence suggested to Hinnebusch a similar set of cells, though not recessed into the walls.Footnote ²¹⁵

On 5 August 1309, Piers Gaveston was forced to surrender lands and castles to King Edward II at a meeting in the latter’s ‘chamber in the house of the Friars Preachers at Stamford’; and from the close rolls it appears likely that Edward stayed there, no doubt with his immediate retinue, for about a week (from 30 July to 5 August).Footnote ²¹⁶ Like many religious houses, the Dominican priories had rooms or apartments available for important guests. Already in the summer of 1298, Edward’s father had spent fifteen days in the convent at Stirling while recovering from an injury after the house had survived the torching of the town by Scottish forces.Footnote ²¹⁷ Two years later, both the king and queen stayed at the Pontefract priory, which had been founded by Edmund de Lacy in the mid-1250s with a then-precinct of six acres. The royal couple arrived in January, and the queen remained while the king rode north to Scotland. They were there again at Pentecost, and the king at least returned for a third visit at the start of Advent.Footnote ²¹⁸ That the royal party did not lodge at the castle, or with the Cluniac monks of St John’s Priory, is unlikely to reflect the quality of the accommodation, but is more probably a public mark of favour or piety. Franciscan houses would serve the same function on other occasions.Footnote ²¹⁹ A similar close bond between the crown and the Dominican friars may be the best explanation of why Edward IV’s consort, Queen Elizabeth, gave birth to their second son in the Shrewsbury priory’s guest accommodation on 17 August 1473. The king, while still Earl of March, had spent Christmas there thirteen years previously.Footnote ²²⁰ Other noble lodgers probably held a more proprietorial interest in houses where they were frequent visitors. In 1305 Baron Hugh de Courtney was staying at the Exeter Blackfriars when he had an altercation with the city’s mayor. Evidence suggests the family had permanent lodgings at the house of which they were benefactors.Footnote ²²¹

Houses of Study

What was distinctive about Dominican priories compared with other religious houses was the requirement that their clerical members (and not just the more junior clerical friars in formation) should attend the two daily lectures open to members of the public, one on the Bible, the other on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (though the Oxford General Chapter of 1280 dispensed friars who had already studied theology at an advanced level from attending the latter). For this reason, early General Chapters had required that each house have someone qualified to teach (a lector) and an assistant who tutored the Dominican students through daily and weekly revision sessions. The friars’ intellectual training, its syllabus and institutional organisation, developed over time, but the initial course of study, begun at profession, normally lasted some two years and was undertaken in the house which they had entered as a novice.Footnote ²²²

The intellectually able were then sent to study for several years elsewhere in the Province. After 1259 the Province was required to run a specialist school in the Arts and Philosophy if it did not already do so.Footnote ²²³ In England and Wales studies at this level were eventually organised in schools belonging to the various ‘visitations’ into which the houses were grouped by 1275. These were headed by the priories of London, Oxford, York, and Cambridge. Maura O’Carroll has concluded that the priories of Oxford, London, and Cambridge (and probably York) each ran a provincial school of Theology by the close of the thirteenth century. Evidence indicates a school of Arts and Philosophy in the Cambridge visitation at King’s Lynn, and at King’s Langley in the London visitation, by the mid-fourteenth century. Such schools in the other visitations are highly probable, but where is unknown, and they may have moved between different priories.Footnote ²²⁴ On completion of their course, students returned to teach in their own priories, or elsewhere within their visitation, but the brightest would later be sent to one of the Order’s studia generalia to study theology at the highest level.

The most famous of the studia generalia was at Paris, the only continental university that granted Theology degrees in the thirteenth century; and it was the only Dominican studium generale recognised by the Order before 1248. As a result, it was extremely difficult for the provinces to train their best friars to the highest level. To ease the problem, the General Chapter in 1246 proposed that four provinces would each establish a new studium generale: those of Provence, Lombardy, Teutonia, and England, where both the universities of Oxford and Cambridge granted Theology degrees by ca. 1250, and probably by ca. 1240.Footnote ²²⁵ Other provinces could each send two students to the new studia. Though mandated by the Chapter of 1248, successive English Provincial Chapters and Provincials refused to nominate a priory to this status for the next thirteen years.Footnote ²²⁶ Why is unclear. Space was not an issue at Oxford, as we have seen. The Cambridge precinct just beyond the Barnwell Gate occupied a site of some eight acres by 1279–1280, and had grown to ten acres by 1293, so that the precinct extended up to the town’s Middle Field. However, the Hundred Rolls noted that (as with the town’s Franciscan friary) people had earlier been displaced when houses on the site were knocked down, so space may have been at a premium earlier.Footnote ²²⁷ The friars perhaps feared that the international students would be a financial burden, but the most likely reason was the pressure to accommodate and train the many students from within the British Isles. In 1261 the General Chapter finally stipulated Oxford as the new studium generale. As punishment for the inaction, the Chapter deposed the Provincial, Simon of Hinton, and sent him to teach in Germany where the Provincial placed him in the studium generale at Cologne. He was to fast on bread and water for a week, to receive the discipline (a monastic scourging) seven times, and to say seven Masses. The English diffinitors who had blocked the residence of international students at Oxford were disqualified from holding this office for seven years whether at Provincial or General Chapters; any priors among them were likewise dismissed from office; they were to fast on bread and water for thirteen days; and they were to receive the discipline thirteen times. The numbers seven and thirteen matched the number of years that Hinton had served as Provincial and the years since the Chapter of 1248! Cambridge would finally be designated as a studium generale much later – by 1320.Footnote ²²⁸

The Irish and Scottish houses were not grouped into visitations in 1275, but had probably been governed for some time as vicariates by a Vicar-Provincial with their own regional chapters (we have already noted the late thirteenth-century Irish chapters listed in BL MS Add. 4789). A homesick English agent, Laurence de Sumercot, had met the Dominican Vicar-Provincial for Ireland in 1256, as well as his Franciscan counterpart to discuss ‘the business of the cross’. He told his correspondent that the Irish Dominican Chapter would take place at Cassel at the end of June.Footnote ²²⁹ This raises the question of how intellectual formation was organised in the vicariates.

In Ireland, as elsewhere, every priory was required to have a lector who taught daily. Colman O’Clabaigh has noted that the Archbishop of Tuam built a ‘scholars’ house’ at Athenry in the 1250s together with a bequest of canon law books to the friars. This may be an example of bishops deciding that a Dominican theological school met the requirements of the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils for a theological school in each diocese, so that we should envisage secular ordinands attending alongside the Dominican students.Footnote ²³⁰ It is unclear, however, whether or how the Irish houses were organised to teach intermediate studies. Though we might presume that Dublin was one location for such teaching, a letter from the Master issued after the 1314 General Chapter in London permitted the admission of promising students to studia particularia in England to study philosophy, which suggests either an insufficiency or lack of such schools in Ireland. The Irish Vicar-Provincial was expected to pay the costs incurred by such students only to the extent that English friars incurred the same costs. The letter indicates that none of the Irish houses ran a studium generale, but three students could be sent from Ireland at any one time to the studium at Paris, two to that in Oxford, two to that in Cambridge, and two to the London Priory.Footnote ²³¹ A letter from the Master to the Scottish Vicar-Provincial in 1349 similarly permitted him to send one student to a studium generale of his choosing. Given the number of houses in the Scottish vicariate (probably twelve by the mid-fourteenth century), and the lack of Scottish universities before the foundation of St Andrews (ca. 1410), we may conclude that there was no advanced studium in Scotland, and we are in the dark about the existence of any intermediate studia. William Moir Bryce presumed that the Edinburgh priory held such a school.Footnote ²³² Several scholars have asserted that Perth at some point became a ‘central study house’ for Scottish friars, but this is not supported by reference to the evidence.Footnote ²³³ What little we possess of the latter probably tells against the claim for this period. A terse letter from the English Provincial to the Prior and brethren of Perth, probably written before the late thirteenth century, orders them to provide ‘your student (studenti vestro) Thomas de Karric’ with the books he needed and sufficient money (in libris sui necessariis et in pecunia conpetentur) so that the student had no grounds for complaint at the next provincial chapter. This suggests that Thomas was either a member of the Perth house in Perth or more probably elsewhere in the Province, though not at a studium generale outside the Province when responsibility for his expenses more clearly lay with the Provincial himself.Footnote ²³⁴

Study required more books than could be purchased for each individual student or teacher. Humphreys has noted that a mendicant religious community might have ‘four collections of books – one in Choir or Sacristy, one in the Refectory, a chained reference collection and the books in the communal library from which friars might borrow items’. It is likely that in the largest houses the latter two collections were housed in a room set aside for the purpose. We saw earlier how a book could move from personal use to use in the refectory; others circulated among the brethren, as well as to or from the conventual library: one of the few books extant from an Dominican library in England reveals that it was once appropriated to the use of Thomas Newark OP, at another time to the ‘Lincoln community of the order of friars preachers’.Footnote ²³⁵

A Teaching Mission at the Universities

The school system described above existed primarily to train fellow Dominicans, but the presence of studia generalia in Oxford and Cambridge, with scholars competent to teach in these universities, made these two studia intellectual centres that contributed to wider currents of thought as open lectures became commentaries and treatises.Footnote ²³⁶ Robert Bacon, a ‘regent’ Master in Theology (someone currently lecturing and presiding over disputations), joined the Order at Oxford not long after 1227; and his Dominican pupil, Richard Fishacre, succeeded to the same position in ca. 1240. Trevet praised Fishacre’s commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard as ‘of great use to his generation’ (temporibus suis perutile). The work secured the place of the Sentences in the Oxford curriculum,Footnote ²³⁷ and it was even thought that Aquinas had wished to consult Fishacre’s text.Footnote ²³⁸ Matthew Paris said of these two friars after they died in 1248: ‘[d]uring their lives, it is believed, no one surpassed or even equalled them in theology and other sciences. They had lectured brilliantly on theology for many years and were famous for preaching the word of God to the people.’Footnote ²³⁹ Simon of Hinton, whose deposition as Provincial was noted earlier, was another influential teacher. He probably served at Oxford as regent Master after 1248; his respected Summa iuniorum is described by recent scholars as ‘a compendium of elementary theology, meant for the instruction of priests’.Footnote ²⁴⁰

For much of this early period the Oxford friars, Dominican or Franciscan, met with little open resentment or with opposition to their teaching from secular counterparts in the university. In February 1253, however, a previously latent objection to the friars’ approach became apparent when the Franciscan Thomas of York was put forward as a regent Master in Theology. His suitability to incept was questioned on the grounds that anyone who wished to become a Doctor in Theology had first to serve as a regent Master in the Arts. The friars had previously been exempted from this traditional requirement at Oxford, as they were forbidden from studying the Arts. Thomas was allowed to incept; but a statute was enacted in March 1253 that affirmed the traditional practice, and formalised the need for the mendicants to gain a dispensation for each friar who wished to incept without first lecturing in the Arts. The statute caused few difficulties in the decades which followed, especially after the Dominicans dropped the prohibition on study of the Arts in 1259, and incorporated this subject into the curriculum of provincial studia.Footnote ²⁴¹ The issue twice resurfaced in the early fourteenth century when, among other grievances, the Dominicans complained to the pope that some of their candidates were unfairly refused a dispensation. As the case dragged on, Thomas Waleys OP found his doctoral studies delayed by three years, probably between 1317 and 1320. Yet, the resolution of the dispute left the requirement essentially unchanged.Footnote ²⁴²

Sheehan has reckoned that ‘[i]n the half century before 1330 Dominicans and Franciscans dominated the faculty of theology’ at Oxford.Footnote ²⁴³ It was during this period that the Dominican teachers included Richard Knapwell, Thomas Sutton, Nicholas Trevet, with whose Annales this chapter opened; and Thomas Waleys (d. post-1349), who also taught at Bologna and completed an unfinished commentary by Trevet on St. Augustine’s City of God. Sheehan’s period ends only just before Robert Holcot OP held the regent’s chair from 1333 to 1334, and would probably hold the same position at Cambridge later. Of Holcot’s many works, his commentary on the Book of Wisdom was widely read in the next century and a half. John Waryn, rector of the Cornish parish of Menheniot, bequeathed in 1426 to the Prior of Launceston ‘and his convent, a book called Holcote on the “Book of Wisdom” to pray for my soul’.Footnote ²⁴⁴

Franciscans had been the first friars of note in the Cambridge Theology faculty, but the other orders were quick to emulate their success and ‘by the end of the century’, as at Oxford, ‘Theology was … dominated by the mendicant friars, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans’.Footnote ²⁴⁵ Among the latter we may note ‘Brother Siger’, described sometime around 1260 in the Lives of the Brethren as ‘vita, scientia, et fama praeclarus, lector in universitate Cantebrigie’.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Here, too, the early fourteenth century saw similar tensions to those in Oxford between seculars and the friars. University statutes of November 1303 restricted the legislative powers of the Theology faculty to govern its own practices and symbolised this stricter control by the wider university in a requirement that friars – like anyone else – who wished to incept as doctors in Theology had first to preach at Great St Mary’s. The friars objected, and although this ritual snub was removed, the university retained its newfound hold over the friars.Footnote ²⁴⁷