departing from the province of York and returning to him who had sent him. He gives as reason for not having come to them the business of his church (circa ecclesiam nostram iugis occupatio), the claims of study, and the distress of the monks owing to a famine. If the church be that of Ripon, and the famine that of 1194, we should get an earlier date for Peter's tenure of his Ripon prebend. To the abbot of Fountains, Ralph Haget (1190-1203), he writes on another occasion telling of a fever from which he has not yet fully recovered. At some time between 1195, when Hubert Walter became legate, and 1203, when Abbot Ralph died, Peter attested a composition between the churches of Ripon and Topcliffe, which was made at Faversham in the archbishop's presence.[1]
Peter's tenure of the deanery of Wolverhampton was singularly unhappy. We hear of it first about 1190, in a letter (Ep. 108) written to William Longchamp bishop of Ely, legate and chancellor, in which he asks him to defend the ancient privileges of the church of Wolverhampton against the oppressions of the sheriff of Stafford, as indeed he had already promised to do.[2] The deanery was a royal peculiar, and it may be that Peter had but recently received it from K. Richard, with whom he says that he left England on 11 December 1189.
Some seven years later we find a letter (Ep. 147) written to Robert of Shrewsbury, the bishop-elect of Bangor, complaining that on the very day of his ordination as priest he had quarrelled with Peter and made trouble with the archbishop in the matter of a small prebend, to which a poor clerk had already been appointed, but which the bishop-elect wished to retain. The poor clerk has already appealed to Rome. What has the bishop-elect to do any longer with a dwelling at Wolverhampton? Will he not, before the day of his consecration, retire from the contest and spare the poor clerk the burden of carrying his appeal to the Roman court? The bishop was consecrated 16 March 1197.
Finally in 1204 Peter wrote to Innocent III a long description of the scandalous state of the church of Wolverhampton (Ep. 152). The deanery, he says, had always been in the king's gift, and the dean appointed to the prebends. But he had found the canons as undisciplined as Welshmen or Scots.[3] They married into each other's families, and held close together. When a vacancy was caused by
