Some rectors of churches, whom the Archbishop had sent to the Universities, had even been obliged to return home owing to the impossibility of getting Bibles and other theological books. Perhaps these rectors were not filled with a passionate desire to learn. In 1373 the University passed a statute against the excessive number of unauthorized booksellers in Oxford[421].
Richard of Bury mentions the great help he received from Dominicans and Franciscans in collecting his books[422], and bears testimony to the magnificence of the libraries of the Mendicants which he visited:
‘there we found heaped up amid the utmost poverty the utmost riches of wisdom[423].’
But Richard of Bury notices a tendency among the ‘religious’ to subordinate the love of books to
‘the threefold superfluous care of the belly, clothes, and houses[424],’
and the tendency became much stronger after his time. The almost[425] total absence of books in the bequests to the Oxford Franciscans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is the more striking because of the frequency of such bequests to colleges. It is said that the Minorites sold many of their books to Dr. Thomas Gascoigne[426]. Certain it is that in the latter days they parted with them, just as ‘forcyd by necessitie,’ they parted with their jewels and plate[427]. The exclusion of the Mendicant Friars from the use of the University Library by the statutes of 1412[428], cannot have been any real hardship to the Franciscans so long as their own library was intact. In the sixteenth century however this was no longer the case, and we accordingly find some instances of Franciscans supplicating for admission to the library of the University[429]. The earliest instance is in 1507; but, as the registers from 1463 to 1505 are lost, it would of course be ridiculous to attempt to draw from this fact any inference as to the date of the dispersion of the books of the Minorites. Leland visited the Friary shortly before the Dissolution, and we have from his pen the last description of the once famous library[430]:—
‘At the Franciscans’ house there are cobwebs in the library, and moths and bookworms; more than this—whatever others may boast—nothing, if you have regard to learned books. For I, in spite of the opposition of all the friars, carefully examined all the bookcases of the library.’