=Ralph of Maidstone=, bishop of Hereford 1234-1239, resigned his see in December, 1239, and was admitted into the Franciscan Order by Haymo[1251]. He took this step in accordance with a vow, made perhaps before he became bishop[1252]. It is uncertain at which convent he took the habit. Bartholomew of Pisa states that he helped with his own hands to build the church at Oxford[1253]. It is not improbable that he was there for some time. He was a Master of Paris, noted for his learning, and was among the ‘famous Englishmen’ who left Paris owing to the disputes in 1229 and settled at Oxford on the invitation of Henry III[1254]. According to a later addition in one of the MSS. of Eccleston’s Chronicle, he lived five years after assuming the habit, staying for the most part in the convent of Gloucester[1255]. The Dunstable Annals state that he was, for a time at any rate, rendered incapable by a fall from a rock, but whether this took place before or after he became a friar is not quite clear[1256]. He died at Gloucester (c. 1245) and ‘was buried in the choir of the brethren, in the presbytery, on the north side under an arch[1257].’ A most interesting relic of the friar-bishop is now in the British Museum. Royal MS. 3 C. xi, a copy of the New Testament with gloss (sec. xiii), belonged to the Friars Minors of Canterbury, ‘_ex dono Fratris Radulphi de Maydenestane, quondam Episcopi Herefordensis_.’ He wrote a _Commentary on the Sentences_ when he was Archdeacon of Chester (c. A. D. 1220). This is mentioned in a treatise on the Sacraments, ‘_secundum Mag. R. de Maidinstan archidiaconum Cestrensem super Sententias_.’ MS. London: Gray’s Inn, 14, f. 28-32 (sec. xiii). =William of Nottingham= was marked out by nature for a Mendicant Friar. ‘He told me,’ writes Eccleston, ‘that when he was living in his father’s house and some poor boys came begging alms, he gave them of his bread, and received the crust from them, because it seemed to him, that hard bread, which was asked for the love of God, was sweeter than the delicate bread which he ate and his companions; and so, to make their bread sweet like this, the little boys went and begged in their turn (_ab invicem_) for the love of God[1258].’ William’s brother, Augustine, was also a Minorite; he was first in the household of Innocent IV, accompanied the Patriarch of Antioch, the pope’s nephew, to Syria, and at length became bishop of Laodicea[1259]. William himself successfully championed the interests of his Order against the Dominicans at the Roman Curia[1260]. At one period he lived for some time in the Franciscan convent at Rome, where, though (to quote his own words) ‘the brethren had no pittance except chestnuts, he grew so fat that he often blushed[1261].’ He acted as vicar for Friar Haymo in England (1239), and in 1240 was himself