Outside the time of the elections and visitations, the bishops exercised generally a paternal and watchful care over the religious houses of their diocese. Before the suppression of the alien priories, for example, these foreign settlements were supervised by the Ordinary quite as strictly as were the English religious houses under his jurisdiction. These priories were mostly established in the first instance to look after estates which had been bestowed upon foreign abbeys, and the number in each house was supposed to be strictly limited, and was, in fact, small. It was not uncommon, however, to find that more than the stipulated number of religious were quartered upon the small community by the foreign superior, or that an annual payment greater than the revenue of the English estate would allow was demanded by the authorities of the foreign mother-house. Against both of these abuses the bishop of the diocese had officially to guard. We find, for instance, Bishop Grandisson of Exeter giving his licence for a monk of Bec to live for some months only at Cowick Priory, and for another to leave Cowick on a visit to Bec. Also in regard to Tywardreath, a cell of the Abbey of St. Sergius, near Ghent, the same bishop on examination found that the revenue was so diminished that it could not support the six monks it was supposed to maintain, and he therefore sent back three of their number to their mother-house on the Continent. This conclusion, be it remarked, was arrived at only after careful inquiry, and after the bishop had for a time appointed a monk from another religious house to assist the foreign superior in the administration of the temporals of his priory. Upon the report of this assistant he deprived the superior for negligence, and appointed custodians of the temporalities of the house. From the episcopal registers generally it appears, too, that once the foreign religious were settled in any alien priory, they came under the jurisdiction of the bishop of the locality, in the same way as the English religious. The alien prior’s appointment had to be confirmed by him, and no religious could come to the house or go from it, even to return to the foreign mother-house, without his permission.