Even in the earliest times it was found necessary to modify the stringency of the rule in favour of the lecturers. Visiting and good works were subordinated to their scholastic duties[234]. They were provided with more ample accommodation than the other friars, and their privacy was at certain times inviolable[235]. In the Constitutions of Benedict XII (1337) regulations for their support are given with some detail[236]. Masters, lectors, and bachelors in Universities were to be provided with the necessaries of life by the convents of the places where they lectured. But their other expenses, such as those connected with the necessary books, were to be assessed by the General or Provincial Minister and to fall on the convent from which they were sent; or, if the convent was unable to ‘procure’ the funds, these were to be supplied by the custody or province in which the native convent of the lecturer was situated. In addition to this, seculars and members of other religious Orders who attended the lectures, would no doubt have to pay fees[237]. We may reasonably infer that Grostete practised in the Franciscan school the system of instruction in theology which he subsequently recommended to the University. When consulted by the latter, he answered that the Regent Masters in theology ought to take the Old and New Testaments as the only sure foundations of their teaching and make them the subject of all their morning lectures, according to the custom of the Doctors of Paris[238]. Roger Bacon laments the exaggerated respect which was paid to the ‘Sentences’ in his day, and points out that ‘the learned men of old, some of whom we have seen, such as Robert bishop of Lincoln and Friar Adam de Marisco, used only the text’ which was ‘given to the world from the mouth of God and of the Saints[239].’ At the Friary, as in the rest of the University, much of the teaching in the theological faculty was, even in the thirteenth century, done by bachelors[240]; the admission to the degree of B.D. was accompanied by a licence to ‘lecture on the book of the Sentences.’ Some of the lectures would probably be for the brethren alone; others were open to the University[241]. The latter would certainly be the case when a friar delivered the lectures, which he was bound to give as ‘Necessary Regent,’ in his monastery. These courses seem however to have been sometimes delivered in the University Schools in School Street[242]. The academic studies of the friars were confined to the faculty of theology (in its wide mediaeval sense), and of canon law, the ‘handmaid’ of theology. The regulars were for the most part subject to the same statutes as the secular students in these faculties, with some important modifications.