Gifford remained at Oxford for about four years, part of which time he spent in the boarding school kept by the Catholic physician, Etheridge, where he had been placed on the compulsory retirement of Bridgewater for refusal to conform.
[1] After having also obtained his baccalaureate in theology on the completion of a four-year course in that science under Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, Gifford was forced to quit Leuven owing to the disturbances in the Low Countries.
[2] Gifford pursued his ecclesiastical studies at Paris, at the University of Reims, which he visited (1577) at the invitation of Cardinal William Allen, and at the English College at Rome, to which he was admitted as a student on 15 September 1579.
About this time (1597) Gifford was appointed to the deanery of Lille, which office Pope Clement VIII conferred on him at the urging, it is alleged, of the Archbishop of Milan.
In 1608, Gifford, who had always esteemed the Benedictines, and befriended them in many ways, took the habit of that order under the religious name of Gabriel of St Mary and subsequently became prior of the Monastery of St. Lawrence at Dieulouard (Dieulewart), now Ampleforth Abbey in England.