Worcester monks and education, c. 1300

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