One of the outstanding features of Worcester Cathedral library is the number of surviving books, dateable from the late thirteenth century onwards, associated with the monks’ studies at Oxford. The impetus behind these studies is well known: a growing awareness by the Benedictine Monks generally that they needed to participate in the intellectual life of universities in the same way as the Friars. From 1277 on, the General Chapters of the English Black Monks issued decrees aimed at the formation of a house of studies at Oxford, and in 1291 the newly formed Gloucester College was made the common property of the southern province. By this time Worcester was already sending monks to Oxford, and by the early 1300s university-based intellectual life at the Cathedral Priory was not only active, but probably more active than it would ever be again. The community was keen to engage in this enterprise; it anticipated by decades Pope Benedict XII's injunction to Benedictine monasteries in 1336 to support at least one monk out of twenty annually at university. The evidence shows that Worcester supported two monks annually at Oxford virtually continuously from the 1290s until the Dissolution. Of the total known monastic population across that period, about one in nine was a university graduate at any one time. This paper focuses on the earliest group of these participants, with the aim of demonstrating that they are worth more attention than they have been accorded.

At least thirty-two books now at the Cathedral can be associated with OxfordUniversity: that is, they were made, obtained, or used there. The focus of the earliest peak of this enthusiasm seems to have been one John of St Germans, the only Worcester monk to have achieved real intellectual distinction, not only within England but on the Continent as well. Of Cornish origin, he was a student at Oxford by 1295, a monk of Worcester by 1298. In 1302 he was nominated, in controversial circumstances, to the bishopric of Worcester, but resigned before the pope in the same year. He was invited to lecture in theology at St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, in 1308.