J.R.H. Moorman's Church Life in the Thirteenth Century was published by Cambridge University Press in 1945 and almost immediately reprinted. As its title suggests, it is concerned with the social, rather than the institutional, history of the Church. One strength of the book is its detailed attention to the parish and the parochial clergy, while the two final chapters cover a topic close to Moorman's heart, the mendicant orders. It is an original, ambitious, and readable book, characterized by a use of architectural and artistic, as well as textual, evidence. The present chapter is devoted to the drawings of two Franciscans and two Dominicans which survive in a manuscript of the works of Alexander Nequam and which have not been discussed in detail in the secondary literature. While being no more than a recondite contribution to the wide subject covered in Moorman's book, it is offered here to honour the memory of a distinguished historian and churchman whom I met only once but to whose numerous publications I owe a great deal.

MS Gg.6.42 in Cambridge University Library (henceforth cited as G) was written in England in the mid-thirteenth century and contains a unique text of the Florilegium of Alexander Nequam (also called Neckam or Neckham). Nequam was born in 1157 and studied at Paris and Oxford.