‘there came a certain poor man, humble and despised, in the habit of those poor friars, and he cried with a loud voice: “O most impartial Judge, the blood of my brethren, which hath been shed this night, crieth unto Thee. The guardians of this place have refused them meat and lodging, although they have left all for Thy sake, and were now coming here to seek those souls which Thou hast redeemed with Thy blood; they would not, in fact, have refused as much to jesters and mummers.”... Then the Judge commanded them to be hanged on the elm that stood in that cloister.’ In the morning the young monk found his companions dead, and became an early convert to the order of St. Francis. On their arrival at Oxford, the two friars were received with great kindness by the Dominicans. ‘They ate in their refectory, and slept in their dormitory, like conventuals for eight days[6].’ They then hired a house in the parish of St. Ebbe from Robert le Mercer[7]. Alms sufficient for the purpose were probably already forthcoming, as the new Order did not have to wait long for recognition. Though they only occupied this house till the following summer[8], they were there joined by ‘many honest bachelors and many eminent men’[9]; and it may have been owing to this increase in their numbers that they left their first abode in 1225 and hired a house with ground attached from Richard the Miller[10]. It is significant of the rapid growth of opinion in their favour that Richard ‘within a year conferred the land and house on the community of the town for the use of the Friars Minors.’ Enthusiasm and self-sacrifice were the powerful agents which ensured success and favour to the early Franciscans, and many are the stories of their primitive poverty and its effects; and if the convent at Oxford was not especially distinguished like that at Cambridge by ‘_paucilitas pecuniae_,’ or like that at York by ‘_zelus paupertatis_[11],’ the Oxford Minorites, during the time of Agnellus at least, departed but little from the ideal of their founder[12], and lived the life of the poor among whom they ministered. The pangs of hunger were not unknown in the convent; and on one occasion the friars were in debt to the amount of ten marks for food[13]. Their first houses were mean and small--too small for the numbers who flocked to their Order[14]; and the infirmary was ‘so low that the height of the walls did not much exceed the height of a man[15].’ When at length they built their church, the brethren worked with their own hands, and a bishop and an abbat who had assumed the coarse habit of the friars are said to have ‘carried water and sand and stones for the building of the place[16].’