No living English medievalist has done more than Barrie Dobson to illuminate the role of the universities in the history of the Black Monks. Whether in his studies of the two great houses of Durham and Canterbury—each of which exemplified the tradition of autonomy so fundamental to the order by founding its own house of study at Oxford—or in his masterly rehabilitation of the general contribution of the monks to the life of medieval Oxford—now matched by a foray into the relatively uncharted territory of the place of the monks at Cambridge—or in such more detailed studies as his unravelling of the collective Benedictine foundation at Oxford of Gloucester College, Barrie Dobson has brought to life le moine universitaire. Hence an account of the only English monk-bishop to establish a college for secular clerks at Oxford or Cambridge can find an appropriate place in a collection of essays compiled in Barrie Dobson's honour. The fact that this same bishop, of modest origins and elected in the face of fierce and unscrupulous opposition from both the archbishop of Canterbury and the royal government, displayed the idealism to found the first college in the nascent and as yet insecure University of Cambridge may also strike a chord with the student of the tales of Robin Hood.