Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Marrey, John
MARREY or MAREE, JOHN (d. 1407), Carmelite, derived his name from his native village, Marr, four miles from Doncaster. He entered the Carmelite friary at Doncaster, where, according to Leland, he studied successively literæ humaniores, philosophy, and theology, and took the degree of doctor of decrees. He acquired a great reputation as a scholastic theologian, disputant, and preacher, and is recorded by the Abbot Tritheim (De Ecclesiæ Scriptoribus, cap. 49) to have been thought 'the most acute theologian in the Oxonian palæstra.' Edward III in 1376 appointed him, with some other doctors of law, to appease the quarrel between the faculties of arts and theology and the civil and canon lawyers at Oxford, who had already come to blows (Wood, Antiquities of the University of Oxford, i. 490, ed. Gutch). He is said to have 'converted or confounded the turbulent and seditious followers of Wiclif' (Pits, Scriptoribus).
Marrey was for a long period head of the Carmelite convent at Doncaster, where he died on 18 March 1407; he was buried in the choir of its chapel. He wrote, besides scholastic theology, treatises against the Wiclifites and upon the epigrams of Martial, which were known to Bale. The Joannes Marreis, prebendary of Shareshill, Staffordshire, whom Tanner is inclined to identify with Marrey, seems to be another person (Le Neve, Fasti, ed. Hardy, i. 606, 615).
[Bale's Lives of Carmelite Writers, Harleian MS. 3838. fol, 78, and De Scriptor. Maj. Brit. cent. vii. No. 32: Pits, De Illustribus Angliæ Scriptoribus, p. 585; Biblioteca Carmelitana, 1752, ii. 54; Fuller's Worthies, 1662. bk. iii. p. 207.]