Almoner Isabel Croke

She lost. Within forty years a form of words about who might be received had hardened into the Writ. Her notes are the best evidence of how it happened, because she is arguing against something not yet settled.

An almoner keeps the alms table and the charge of parishes: who is relieved, by which parish, at whose cost. Isabel Croke kept Oxford's in the years when the city grew faster than its almshouses, when the parishes began declining settlements they had granted before, and when the chapter, asked to decide between them, drew up a wording on whom the parishes must take in.

Her Notes upon the Charge of Parishes, written in 4441, watch that form of words begin to harden. She saw that a rule about cost was becoming a rule about bodies, that the marked would be the first to be declined because they were the easiest to name, and she said so with the plainness of a woman who had sat at the alms table every morning for twenty years. She also wrote, more drily, about the vestry, the constable, the assize and the chapter's habit of choosing its successors from among men it had chosen once; and those sentences are still quoted by people who have never heard of the Writ.

The rule became a Writ, and the Writ became iron. Croke kept the alms table to the end of her life and relieved the marked who came to the gate out of the almoner's own purse, which the Writ did not yet forbid. The Afflicted who know her name call her the last door at Oxford. The chapter keeps her notes and lends them to scholars who wish to prove that the Writ was never intended.

In person

About forty-five, tall and rawboned, with a long plain face, grey eyes and strong hands red from cold water. A black wool gown with close sleeves and a white linen falling band, a white starched cap under a black hood, a bunch of keys and a purse at her girdle; she sits at the alms table in a stone passage, a ledger open before her, a line of the poor along the wall.