MARSH, ADAM (ADAM DE MARISCO) (d. c. 1258), English Franciscan, scholar and theologian, was born about 1200 in the diocese of Bath, and educated at Oxford under Grosseteste. Before 1226 Adam received the benefice of Wearmouth from his uncle, Richard Marsh, bishop of Durham; but between that year and 1230 he entered the Franciscan order. About 1238 he became the lecturer of the Franciscan house at Oxford. Roger Bacon, his pupil, speaks highly of his attainments in theology and mathe matics. Consulted as a friend by Grosseteste, as a spiritual director by Simon de Montfort, the countess of Leicester and the queen, as an expert lawyer and theologian by the primate, Boni face of Savoy, he did much to guide the policy both of the opposi tion and of the court party in all matters affecting the interests of the Church. He shrank from office, and never became provincial minister of the English Franciscans, though constantly charged with responsible commissions. Henry III. and Archbishop Boni
face unsuccessfully endeavoured to secure for him the see of Ely in 1256. In 1257 Adam's health was failing, and he appears to have died in the following year. He sympathized with Montfort as with a friend of the Church and an unjustly treated man; but on the eve of the baronial revolution he was on friendly terms with the king. He rebuked both parties in the state for their shortcomings, but he did not break with either.
See his correspondence, with J. S. Brewer's introduction, in Monu menta franciscana, vol. i. (Rolls ser., 1858) ; the biographical notice in A. G. Little's Grey Friars in Oxford (Oxford, 1892), where all the references are collected. On Marsh's relations with Grosseteste, see Roberti Grosseteste epistolae, ed. H. R. Luard (Rolls ed., 1860 , and F. S. Stevenson, Robert Grosseteste (London, 1809). (H. W. C. D.)