With the Provencals and Savoyards came a fresh swarm of Romans.  In 1237 the first papal legates a latere since the recall of Pandulf landed in England.  The deputy of Gregory IX. was the cardinal-deacon Otto, who in 1226 had already discharged the humbler office of nuncio in England.  It was believed that the legate was sent at the special request of Henry III., and despite the remonstrances of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Those most unfriendly to the legate were won over by his irreproachable conduct.  He rejected nearly all gifts.  He was unwearied in preaching peace; travelled to the north to settle outstanding differences between Henry and the King of Scots, and thence hurried to the west to prolong the truce with Llewelyn.  His zeal for the reformation of abuses made the canons of the national council, held under his presidency at St. Paul’s on November 18, 1237, an epoch in the history of our ecclesiastical jurisprudence.

Despite his efforts the legate remained unpopular.  The pluralists and nepotists, who feared his severity, joined with the foes of all taxation and the enemies of all foreigners in denouncing the legate.  To avoid the danger of poison, he thought it prudent to make his own brother his master cook.  During the council of London it was necessary to escort him from his lodgings and back again with a military force.  In the council itself the claim of high-born clerks to receive benefices in plurality found a spokesman in so respectable a prelate as Walter of Cantilupe, the son of a marcher baron, whom Otto had just enthroned in his cathedral at Worcester, and the legate, “fearing for his skin,” was suspected of mitigating the severity of his principles to win over the less greedy of the friends of vested interests.  His Roman followers knew and cared little about English susceptibilities, and feeling was so strong against them that any mischance might excite an explosion.  Such an accident occurred on St. George’s day, April 23, 1238, when the legate was staying with the Austin Canons of Oseney, near Oxford, while the king was six miles off at Abingdon.  Some of the masters of the university went to Oseney to pay their respects to the cardinal, and were rudely repulsed by the Italian porter.  Irritated at this discourtesy, they returned with a host of clerks, who forced their way into the abbey.  Amongst them was a poor Irish chaplain, who made his way to the kitchen to beg for food.  The chief cook, the legate’s brother, threw a pot of scalding broth into the Irishman’s face.  A clerk from the march of Wales shot the cook dead with an arrow.  A fierce struggle followed, in the midst of which Otto, hastily donning the garb of his hosts, took refuge in the tower of their church, where he was besieged by the infuriated clerks, until the king sent soldiers from Abingdon to release him.  Otto thereupon laid Oxford under an interdict, suspended all lectures, and put thirty masters into prison.  English opinion, voiced by the diocesan, Grosseteste, held that the cardinal’s servants had provoked the riot, and found little to blame in the violence of the clerks.