It was natural, therefore, that these well-equipped houses should hold out great attractions and opportunities to the needy and houseless student, and that complaint should shortly be made that many young and unsuspicious boys were induced to enrol themselves as members of Franciscan, or Dominican, or other Friars' houses long before they were capable of judging the full importance of their action. One cannot read the biographies of even such strong personalities as those of Roger Bacon or William of Occam without surmising that their adoption of the Franciscan vow was the result rather of the exigency of the student and the proselytising activity to which they were exposed, than of any distinct vocation for the monastic life, or of their own deliberate choice. "Minors and children," as Fuller says in his usual quaint vein, "agree very well together." To such an extent at any rate had the evil spread at Oxford that, in a preamble of a statute passed in 1358, it is asserted, as a notorious fact, that "the nobility and commoners alike were deterred from sending their sons to the University by this very cause; and it was enacted that if any mendicant should induce, or cause to be induced, any member of the University under eighteen years of age to join the said Friars, or should in any way assist in his abduction, no graduate belonging to the cloister or society of which such friar was a member should be permitted to give or attend lectures in Oxford or elsewhere for the year ensuing."[24] It is not perhaps, therefore, surprising to find that the earliest English Collegiate foundation--that of Walter de Merton at Oxford in 1264--should have expressly excluded all members of the religious Orders. The dangers involved in the ascendency of the monks and friars were already patent to many sagacious minds, and Bishop Walter de Merton, who had filled the high office of Chancellor of England, and was already by his position an adversary of the Franciscan interest, was evidently desirous of establishing an institution which should not only baffle that encroaching spirit of Rome which had startled Grosseteste from his allegiance, but should also give an impulse to a system of education which should not be subservient to purely ecclesiastical ideas. This is obviously the principle which underlies the provisions of the statutes of his foundation of Merton College. Bishop Hobhouse in his _Life of Walter de Merton_ has thus carefully interpreted this principle:--