The Earliest Oxford Supplication List for Papal Provisions

Abstract

Abstract In the late 1320s Adam Murimuth (DCL Oxon.), then canon of St Paul’s in London and for almost two decades a successful proctor at Avignon for king, Canterbury, and his alma mater, chronicled events that occurred earlier in his career. One of these, which he mentioned in passing for 1317, was the submission of supplication lists (rotuli) through which the universities of Paris and Oxford, respectively, petitioned the pope for benefices and prebends. The practice of papal supplications, which began in the first pontifical year of John XXII, 1316-17, became the single most important source for benefice and prebend income for university masters in the course of the century. A. B. Emden, in compiling biographical information from the Calendar of Papal Letters edited at the end of the nineteenth century from the parchment registers (Registra Vaticana) in the Vatican Archive, realized that several letters from July 1317 were the result of a papal petition by the University of Oxford.