The Grey Friars were hospitably received by the Black, till Richard le Mercer, a wealthy burgess, let them a house in St Ebbe's parish, "between the church and water-gate (South-gate), in which many honest bachelors and noble persons entered and lived with them." Perhaps it was this increase in their numbers which compelled them to leave their first abode somewhere by the east end of Beef Lane, and to hire a house with ground attached from Richard the Miller. This house lay between the wall and Freren Street (Church Street). All sorts and conditions of men flocked to hear them. Being well satisfied, it is said, as to their honest and simple carriage and well-meaning as also with their doctrine, they began to load them with gifts and to make donations to the city for their use. One of their benefactors, Agnes, the wife of Guy, for instance, gave them "most part of that ground which was afterwards called Paradise" (_cf._ Paradise Square). A small church was built, and bishops and abbots relinquishing their dignities and preferments became Minorites. They scorned not "the roughness of the penance and the robe," but "did with incomparable humility carry upon their shoulders the coul and the hod, for the speedier finishing this structure." The site chosen by the Grey Friars for their settlement is not without significance. The work of the friars was physical as well as moral. Rapid increase of the population huddled within the narrow circle of the walls had resulted here as elsewhere in overcrowding, which accentuated the insanitary conditions of life. A gutter running down the centre of unpaved streets was supposed to drain the mess of the town as well as the slops thrown from the windows of the houses. Garbage of all sorts collected and rotted there. Within the houses the rush-strewn floors collected a foul heritage of scraps and droppings. Personal uncleanliness, encouraged by the ascetic prohibitions and directions of a morbid monasticism, which, revolting from the luxury of the Roman baths and much believing in the necessity of mortifying the flesh, regarded washing as a vice and held that a dirty shirt might cover a multitude of sins, was accentuated by errors of diet, and had become the habit of high and low. Little wonder that fever or plague, or the more terrible scourge of leprosy, festered in the wretched hovels of the suburbs of Oxford as of every town. Well, it was to haunts such as these that S. Francis had pointed his disciples. At London they settled in the shambles of Newgate; at Oxford they chose the swampy suburb of S. Ebbe's. Huts of mud and timber, as mean as the huts around them, rose within the rough fence and ditch that bounded the Friary; for the Order of St Francis fought hard, at first, against the desire for fine buildings and the craving for knowledge which were the natural tendencies of many of the brethren. In neither case did the will of their founder finally carry the day.