ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE FRIARS’ MANNER OF LIFE AND MEANS OF LIVELIHOOD: BENEFACTORS. Lost records.--Mendicancy.--Procurators and limitors.--Career of Friar Brian Sandon.--Charges of immorality against the friars.--Their worldly manner of life before the Dissolution.--Poverty of the Convent.--Sources of income.--Annual grants from the King and others.--Frequency of bequests to the friars.--List of benefactors.--Classes from which the friars were drawn.--Motives which led men to become friars. Of the internal economy of the Franciscan house at Oxford, or indeed of any friary in England, little is known or ever can be known. The _Registrum Fratrum Minorum Londoniae_ is, in Brewer’s words, ‘the only work of the kind extant. A painful proof, if such were needed, of the utter devastation committed when the Franciscan convents were dissolved, and their libraries dispersed[577].’ We may here give some account of the records which must once have existed in every Franciscan house or province. From the earliest times an annual _compotus_[578] or balance-sheet of income and expenditure was drawn up, and if in later days this was sometimes omitted, an ex-warden was always liable to be called to render an account to his successor[579]. In each convent would also be kept a list of the brethren who died there[580]; and lists both of living benefactors and of dead, for whose souls prayers or masses were to be said[581], while many in their lifetime received ‘letters of confraternity[582].’ In the decrees of the General Chapter of Paris in 1292 it is commanded[583] that each minister should have the lives and acts of holy friars carefully collected in his province and entered in special registers, and bring them to the General Chapter; also that all notable excesses of friars, grave crimes, and credible accusations, the sentences passed and punishments inflicted on the offenders, should be noted in books kept for the purpose, preserved in the archives of the province, and faithfully handed on to each succeeding minister. The acts of Provincial Chapters were also kept[584]. Of these and similar records we have, besides the London register already alluded to, only a few letters of fraternity[585]. Of English Franciscan records originated by or relating to the convent at Oxford, not one (unless the list of lectors and the account of the controversy with the Dominicans in 1269[586] can be called records) is known to exist[587]. Any account, therefore, of the internal life of the convent must be meagre and unsatisfactory in the highest degree. The hours and numbers of daily services seem to have differed little, if at all, from those observed in other monastic institutions[588]. We may therefore omit this subject and treat of the points which receive additional elucidation from documents relating to Oxford.