‘Better is a patient man than a strong man,’ he writes to the hot-headed earl, ‘and he who can rule his own temper than he who storms a city[932].’ The friar took a keen interest in his friend’s great deeds, recognised his noble qualities, and the value of his efforts ‘to purge, illuminate, and sanctify the church of God,’ and looked to him as the guardian of the public weal[933]. He encouraged the Earl to go forward in his thankless task of saving Gascony, and tried to win the King over to his side[934]. ‘If,’ he writes to the Earl in 1250[935], ‘you have received the answers of broken friendship and feigned affection, what else are you now suffering than what you before expected? The clear circumspection of your wisdom will remember, in how many conferences, after repeated and careful examination, we drummed into each other’s ears the execrable shamelessness of seductive cunning, such as we now see; although, considering the trustworthiness of courageous fidelity, your wisdom did not think proper to decline the danger of a truly grand exploit, for the imminent suspicion merely of some stupendous dishonesty.’ With all his other occupations Adam Marsh did not neglect the poor and oppressed; he begs Grostete to assist two poor scholars relatives of the bishop; he writes to Thomas de Anesti on behalf of an able and honest schoolmaster who is in want of the very necessaries of life; a weeping widow brings her troubles to him, sure of sympathy and help[936]. His health gave way under the strain of his manifold duties and the severe discipline of his Order: he suffered from weakness of the eyes and other infirmities[937]. In 1253 he lost his lifelong friend Grostete, who bequeathed his library to the Oxford Franciscans out of love for Adam Marsh[938]. In 1256 the King and Archbishop of Canterbury tried to force him into the bishopric of Ely; his rival Hugh Balsham who had been elected by the chapter appealed to Rome and obtained a decision in his favour on Oct. 6, 1257. His candidature, probably none of his own seeking, seems to have laid the friar open to a charge of worldly ambition, which must have embittered his last days[939]. Feeling the end approaching, he wrote to Bonaventura to send the Provincial John of Stamford, ‘by whom, through God’s blessing, I may be directed through things transitory and my thoughts raised to things eternal[940].’