There is little contemporary evidence about Simon’s relations with the convent, but it would appear that they were not always good. Sometimes he was high-handed, for instance making grants without the convent’s consent and in charters not authenticated with its seal. Thus, he granted two acres in Harlow to Ralph of Harlow, clerk, ‘without consulting the convent’ (‘conuentu inconsulto’), and the charter was sealed only with his own seal. Similarly, he granted a licence to his knight, Thomas of Ikworth, to enclose his wood at Ickworth with a ditch in a charter ‘without the convent’s seal’ (‘sine sigillo capituli’).

In Jocelin of Brackland’s day, it was the abbot who had to prevent obedientiaries from transacting business without consulting the convent and prevent their using the convent’s seal outside chapter. Now the danger seems to have been that the abbot would alienate the abbey’s property free from any effective control: this danger was especially acute at St Edmunds because of the abbey’s exemption from episcopal authority. Such alienations were forbidden by canon law, a prohibition which Pope Alexander III (1159–81) reiterated in a forceful reply to an inquiry from an Italian bishop. (The surviving text of this papal letter is undated and the addressee unnamed.) Nevertheless, in practice alienations of church and monastic property by prelates were common. Economic and social circumstances often provided them with at best sound reasons, or at worst with plausible excuses, for alienations. Hence came the monks’ insistence that they should be consulted. Their cause was espoused by the first General Chapter of the English Benedictines of the Southern Province, held at Oxford in 1219. The second of its twenty-five clauses states that

The fact that this prohibition was reiterated by the General Chapter of the Southern Province of 14 October 1249 indicates, as other evidence corroborates, that heads of houses took little notice of it.