The appointment of _custodes_ to manage the finances of nunneries was a favourite policy with Archbishop Peckham, doubtless because it facilitated the enforcement of strict enclosure upon the nuns. At Godstow there was already at the time a master, but Peckham also gave the custody of Davington to the vicar of Faversham in 1279, and that of Holy Sepulchre, Canterbury, to the vicar of Wickham in 1284, while at Usk in 1284 he ordered the nuns to have "some senior priest circumspect in temporal and in spiritual affairs to be, with the consent of the diocesan, master of all your goods, internal and external, temporal and spiritual"[779]. At other times a _custos_ would be appointed to meet a particular difficulty when the financial state of a house had become specially weak. About 1303, for instance, a monk of Peterborough was made for a season special warden of St Michael's, Stamford, "with full powers over the temporalities and of adjudicating and ordering all temporal matters both within and without the convent as he should think profitable"; the appointment is specially interesting because there was at the time a resident prior at St Michael's and the "spiritual disposition of all things concerning the house" is reserved to this prior and to the prioress[780]. A more serious crisis occurred at the Priory of White Hall, Ilchester, which was evidently in a disorderly condition at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In 1323 Bishop John of Drokensford wrote to Henry of Birlaunde, rector of Stoke and to John de Herminal, announcing that the Prioress, Alice de Chilterne, was defamed of incontinence with a chaplain and had so mismanaged and turned to her own nefarious uses the revenues of the house that her sisters were compelled to beg their bread; she had however submitted herself to the Bishop, but as public affairs called him to London and as he did not wish to leave the nunnery unprovided for, he committed the custody to these two men, ordering them to administer the necessities of life to the Prioress and sisters, according to the means of the house, until his return[781]. Some ten years later Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury similarly gave the custody of White Hall, Ilchester, to the rectors of Limington and St John's Ilchester[782]. The nunnery of Barrow, near Bristol, was also in a disorderly condition; in 1315 John of Drokensford wrote to the Prioress ordering her to leave the management of secular matters to a _custos_ appointed by him, and the same day appointed William de Sutton; and in 1324-5, when he had been obliged to remove the Prioress Joanna Gurney, he committed the custody of the house to William, rector of Backwell, ordering him to do the best he could with the advice of the subprioress and one of the nuns[783]. More often sheer financial distress, rather than moral disorder, was the reason for which a _custos_ was appointed to a house. At St Sepulchre's Canterbury, the rector of