The Abbey was embroiled in long standing disputes with the townspeople of Colchester throughout the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, as well as several sometimes violent confrontations with the Augustinian convent of St. Botolph's Priory which stood across the road from it. In 1253, following long standing dispute over access to the free warren in West Donyland, to the south of the town, and the extent of the Abbot's jurisdiction, a group of forty Colchester men attacked and destroyed the Abbey's gallows and tumbrels at Greenstead to the East of the town, before cutting the ropes of the Abbey’s ships at Brightlingsea. By 1255 these particular disagreements were settled, although in 1270 the king had to order the abbot to desist from distraining the Colchester men in matters of trespass of bread and ale, as it was outside of his jurisdiction. An anti-Abbey riot broke out at the Midsummers Fair in 1272 on St John's Green outside of the Abbey, and the following day the monks showed the Colchester coroner a dead body on the Green, purportedly one of their number killed by the townspeople. The subsequent investigation, however, found that the body was of a criminal taken down from the town gallows and placed on the Green by the monks in an attempt to defame the burgesses of Colchester. In 1310 an episcopal visit by Bishop Baldock found the Abbey's monks had fallen slack in observing the rules regarding the periods of silence, abstinence from consuming meat (except in times of illness) and "stabilitas" (which stated that Benedictine monks may not move from their monastery to other ones). The Abbey found itself in trouble with the Crown in 1346, when a French prisoner, Berengar de Monte Alto, said to be the archdeacon of Paris, who had been captured at the Battle of Crécy by the English was sold in England for £50. He came into the possession of the abbot, who sold him in London, in direct defiance of the king's writ ordering his detention.