Islip himself has left little record of his own tenure of the office, but if the documents which attest the story of his successor may be taken as illustrative of the Prior’s life in general, it must be assumed that his share in the common life was occasional rather than constant, while the existence of such officials as the Sub-prior and the third or fourth Priors points to a delegation of duties and a system which may have worked well in practice but was not consonant with the Benedictine ideal. Those who are familiar with the course of the development of the collegiate life which Henry VIII. designed for his new foundation at Westminster in after-days will have observed the same forces at work in the gradual isolation of the higher officials from the common table and a somewhat quicker immersion in outside duties. It can hardly be doubted that such forces are disruptive in tendency, not necessarily of the body itself, but of the purpose and ideal for which it was called into being. The Prior in fact found little difficulty in an occasional absence of days together from the monastery. A pilgrimage to the Rood of Grace at Boxley did not require any particular planning or arrangement, while the record of visitors entertained by “your mastership,” as Prior Mane’s faithful steward was wont to call him, shews the independent character of the hospitality which he exercised. Whatever may have been the frequency of his visits to the cloister Mane would seem seldom to have dined in the Refectory. He appears indeed as no unfit ruler of the house but he stands aloof from it none the less, a figure to be regarded by the younger brethren with more awe than love. There is nothing to shew that such a life was regarded as other than normal or that his immediate predecessors had lived in other fashion. Fascet had been Abbot little more than a fortnight when he signed an indenture binding himself and the Convent to pay Henry VII. the sum of five hundred pounds, one hundred of which was to be paid at the following Christmas and the remainder in two equal portions at the end of the ensuing years. The King had represented that he was about to be put to great expense both in obtaining the papal license for and the actual removal of the body of Henry VI. from Windsor to London. Moreover the “diuerse other many and grete charges that our said souverain Lord must bere by the chaunge and alteracion of suche thinges as his Highness ... hadde ordeyned and purposed to have made and done within the said College of Wyndesore” formed an additional claim upon a Convent already somewhat put to it to find money for other purposes.