Nothing is known of his parentage, but he seems to have been a personage of importance, and a lay namesake who held lands in Berkshire is several times mentioned in the Close and Patent Rolls as in John's service.
In February 1203, Morins was sent by the king to Rome, in order to obtain the pope's aid in arranging peace with France, and returned in July with John of Ferentino, cardinal-deacon of Santa Maria in Via Lata, as papal legate.
He preached crusade in 1212, and attended the Lateran council of 1215,[4] after which he remained in Paris for a year to study at the University; but the annals show that he maintained all through his life a keen interest in the affairs of Europe and the East.
In 1206 he was made a visitor for all the religious houses of the diocese of Lincoln (except those of the exempt orders), by the authority of the papal legate; in 1212 he was appointed by the pope to preach the cross in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Huntingdonshire, and in the same year was commissioned to make an estimate of the losses suffered by the clergy and the religious in the diocese through the exactions of King John.
[5] In 1223 and 1228 he was made visitor to his own order, first in the province of York, and afterward in the dioceses of Lincoln and Coventry; and last of all, in 1239, when he must have been quite an old man, he helped to draw up and submit to the pope an account of the difficulties between the Archbishop of Canterbury and his suffragans on the subject of visitation.