This is the story of the Franciscan friary in Cambridge, founded in 1225. It describes the new alliance between poverty and learning that was to give fresh vigour to the Order, deeply influencing the life of England as a whole. It provides biographical notes on many Cambridge Franciscans, including the Custodes, Wardens, Vice-Wardens and Lectors, and on the dispute of 1303-6 between the friars and the university. It ends with the dissolution of the Cambridge house in 1538, and the driving out of the friars. The book is an extended version of John R. H. Moorman’s Birkbeck Lectures of 1948-9.