Thomas Becket
Thomas Becket known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas of London and Thomas à Becket, was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170. He is venerated as a martyr by both the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, he engaged in conflict with Henry II, King of England, over the rights and privileges of the Church and was murdered by followers of the king in Canterbury Cathedral. Soon after his death, he was canonised by Pope Alexander III; the main sources for the life of Becket are a number of biographies written by contemporaries. A few of these documents are by unknown writers, although traditional historiography has given them names; the known biographers are John of Salisbury, Edward Grim, Benedict of Peterborough, William of Canterbury, William fitzStephen, Guernes of Pont-Sainte-Maxence, Robert of Cricklade, Alan of Tewkesbury, Benet of St Albans, Herbert of Bosham. The other biographers, who remain anonymous, are given the pseudonyms of Anonymous I, Anonymous II, Anonymous III.
Besides these accounts, there are two other accounts that are contemporary that appear in the Quadrilogus II and the Thómas saga erkibyskups. Besides these biographies, there is the mention of the events of Becket's life in the chroniclers of the time; these include Robert of Torigni's work, Roger of Howden's Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi and Chronica, Ralph Diceto's works, William of Newburgh's Historia Rerum, Gervase of Canterbury's works. Becket was born about 1119, or in 1120 according to tradition, he was born in Cheapside, London, on 21 December, the feast day of St Thomas the Apostle. He was the son of Matilda Beket. Gilbert's father was from Thierville in the lordship of Brionne in Normandy, was either a small landowner or a petty knight. Matilda was of Norman descent, her family may have originated near Caen. Gilbert was related to Theobald of Bec, whose family was from Thierville. Gilbert began his life as a merchant as a textile merchant, but by the 1120s he was living in London and was a property owner, living on the rental income from his properties.
He served as the sheriff of the city at some point. They were buried in Old St Paul's Cathedral. One of Becket's father's wealthy friends, Richer de L'Aigle invited Thomas to his estates in Sussex where Becket was exposed to hunting and hawking. According to Grim, Becket learned much from Richer, a signatory of the Constitutions of Clarendon against Thomas. Beginning when he was 10, Becket was sent as a student to Merton Priory in England and attended a grammar school in London the one at St Paul's Cathedral, he did not study any subjects beyond the quadrivium at these schools. He spent about a year in Paris around age 20, he did not, study canon or civil law at this time and his Latin skill always remained somewhat rudimentary. Some time after Becket began his schooling, Gilbert Beket suffered financial reverses, the younger Becket was forced to earn a living as a clerk. Gilbert first secured a place for his son in the business of a relative—Osbert Huitdeniers—and later Becket acquired a position in the household of Theobald of Bec, by now the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Theobald entrusted him with several important missions to Rome and sent him to Bologna and Auxerre to study canon law. Theobald in 1154 named Becket Archdeacon of Canterbury, other ecclesiastical offices included a number of benefices, prebends at Lincoln Cathedral and St Paul's Cathedral, the office of Provost of Beverley, his efficiency in those posts led to Theobald recommending him to King Henry II for the vacant post of Lord Chancellor, to which Becket was appointed in January 1155. As Chancellor, Becket enforced the king's traditional sources of revenue that were exacted from all landowners, including churches and bishoprics. King Henry sent his son Henry to live in Becket's household, it being the custom for noble children to be fostered out to other noble houses; the younger Henry was reported to have said Becket showed him more fatherly love in a day than his father did for his entire life. Becket was nominated as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, several months after the death of Theobald.
His election was confirmed on 23 May 1162 by a royal council of noblemen. Henry may have hoped that Becket would continue to put the royal government first, rather than the church. However, the famous transformation of Becket into an ascetic occurred at this time. Becket enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury from a Nottingham Alabaster in the Victoria & Albert Museum Becket was ordained a priest on 2 June 1162 at Canterbury, on 3 June 1162 was consecrated as archbishop by Henry of Blois, the Bishop of Winchester and the other suffragan bishops of Canterbury. A rift grew between Henry and Becket as the new archbishop resigned his chancellorship and sought to recover and extend the rights of the archbishopric; this led to a series of conflicts with the King, including that over the jurisdiction of secular courts over English clergymen, which accelerated antipathy between Becket and the king. Attempts by Henry to influence the other bishops against Becket began in Westminster in October 1163, where the King sought approval of the traditional rights of the royal government in regard to the church.
This led to the Constitutions of Clarendon, where Becket was asked to agree to the King's rights or face political repercussions. King Henry II presided over the assemblies of most of the higher English clergy at Clarendon Palace on 30 January 1164. In sixteen constitutions, he sought less clerical independence and a weaker connec
Système universitaire de documentation
The système universitaire de documentation or SUDOC is a system used by the libraries of French universities and higher education establishments to identify and manage the documents in their possession. The catalog, which contains more than 10 million references, allows students and researcher to search for bibliographical and location information in over 3,400 documentation centers, it is maintained by the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education. Official website
Diocese of Lincoln
The Diocese of Lincoln forms part of the Province of Canterbury in England. The present diocese covers the ceremonial county of Lincolnshire; the diocese traces its roots in an unbroken line to the Pre-Reformation Diocese of Leicester, founded in 679. The see of Leicester was translated to Dorchester in the late 9th century, before taking in the territory of the Diocese of Lindsey and being translated to Lincoln; the diocese was the largest in England, extending from the River Thames to the Humber Estuary. In 1072, Remigius de Fécamp, bishop under William the Conqueror, moved the see to Lincoln, although the Bishops of Lincoln retained significant landholdings within Oxfordshire; because of this historic link, for a long time Banbury remained a peculiar of the Bishop of Lincoln. The modern diocese remains notoriously extensive, having been referred to by Bob Hardy, Bishop of Lincoln, as "2,000 square miles of bugger all" in 2002; the dioceses of Oxford and Peterborough were created in 1541 out of parts of the diocese, which left the diocese with two disconnected fragments and south.
In 1837 the southern part was transferred to other dioceses: Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire to the Diocese of Ely, Hertfordshire to the Diocese of Rochester and Buckinghamshire to the Diocese of Oxford. In 1837 the county of Leicestershire was transferred from Lincoln to Peterborough; the Archdeaconry of Nottingham was transferred to the Lincoln diocese at the same time. In 1884, the Archdeaconry of Nottingham was detached to form a part of the new Diocese of Southwell. By virtue of the 2009 scheme of delegation, whilst the Bishop of Lincoln exercises general oversight, the Bishops of Grimsby and of Grantham were seen as leaders in mission in the north and south of the Diocese until that scheme lapsed upon the 6 April 2013 retirement of the Bishop of Grimsby, followed by a review of roles of bishops in the diocese; the suffragan See of Grantham was created in 1905, the See of Grimsby in 1935. It would seem that the decision to not fill the suffragan see of Grantham was taken at some point, but reversed.
Alternative episcopal oversight is provided by the provincial episcopal visitor, Norman Banks, Bishop suffragan of Richborough, licensed as an honorary assistant bishop of the diocese in order to facilitate his work there. There are three retired bishops living in the diocese who are licensed as honorary assistant bishops: 2001–present: David Tustin, former Bishop suffragan of Grimsby, lives in Wrawby. 2013–present: Another retired area Bishop of Grimsby, David Rossdale, lives in East Keal. 2013–present: Tim Ellis, retired area Bishop of Grantham, lives in Intake, Sheffield. The diocese is divided into 22 deaneries. On 22 April 2013, it was announced that a third archdeacon had been appointed pending a pastoral reorganisation; the changes to the archdeaconries enacted by the resulting pastoral scheme were announced on 15 November: Archdeaconry of Lincoln: Bolingbroke. Bishop of Lincoln Suffragan Bishop of Grimsby Lincoln Cathedral Prebendaries of Aylesbury - The prebend of Aylesbury was attached to the See of Lincoln as early as 1092 Church of England Statistics 2002 Official website Herbermann, Charles, ed..
"Lincoln". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Henry I, Count of Champagne
Henry I, known as the Liberal, was count of Champagne from 1152 to 1181. He was the eldest son of his wife, Matilda of Carinthia. Henry took part in the Second Crusade under the leadership of Louis VII of France, he carried a letter of recommendation from Bernard of Clairvaux addressed to Manuel I Komnenos, Byzantine Emperor. On his father's death, Henry chose to take Champagne, leaving the family's older holdings to his younger brothers. At the time this may have been surprising, for the other territories were richer and better developed. Henry must have foreseen the economic possibilities of Champagne, it is during his rule that the county achieved its high place as one of the richest and strongest of the French principalities. Henry established orderly rule over the nobles of Champagne, could reliably count on the aid of some 2,000 vassals, which just by itself made him a power few in France could equal; this order in turn made Champagne a safe place for merchants to gather, under the count's protection the Champagne Fairs became a central part of long-distance trade and finance in medieval Europe.
In addition, the count's court in Troyes became a renowned literary center. Walter Map was among those; the scholar Stephen of Alinerre was among Henry's courtiers, becoming chancellor of the county in 1176. In 1179 Henry went to Jerusalem again with a party of French knights including his relatives Peter of Courtenay and Philip of Dreux, bishop of Beauvais. Henry returned towards Europe by the land route across Asia Minor, was captured and held to ransom by Kilij Arslan II, Seljuk sultan of Rüm; the ransom was paid by the Byzantine Emperor. Henry would die, 16 March 1181. In 1164, Henry married daughter of Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine, they had four children: Scholastique of Champagne, married William IV of Mâcon Henry II Marie of Champagne, married Baldwin I of Constantinople Theobald Henry built the collegiate church of Saint-Étienne in Troyes between 1157 and 1171, which he planned as a necropolis for the House of Blois. He was buried there, as was his son Theobald III, he was succeeded by their eldest son Henry.
After Henry became king of Jerusalem, the younger son Theobald became count. Benton, John F.. "The Court of Champagne as a Literary Center". Speculum. 36. Berry, Virginia G.. "The Second Crusade". In Setton, Kenneth M. A History of the Crusades. Vol. I; the University of Wisconsin Press. Cline, Ruth Harwood. "Abbot Hugh: An Overlooked Brother of Henry I, Count of Champagne". The Catholic Historical Review. 93. Evergates, Theodore; the Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300. University of Pennsylvania Press. Evergates, Theodore. Henry the Liberal: Count of Champagne, 1127-1181. University of Pennsylvania Press. Hamilton, Bernard; the Leper King and His Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Cambridge University Press
Old St Paul's Cathedral
Old St Paul's Cathedral was the medieval cathedral of the City of London that, until 1666, stood on the site of the present St Paul's Cathedral. Built from 1087 to 1314 and dedicated to Saint Paul, the cathedral was the fourth church on the site at Ludgate Hill. Work on the cathedral began during the reign of William the Conqueror after a fire in 1087 that destroyed much of the city. Work took more than 200 years, construction was delayed by another fire in 1135; the church was enlarged in 1256 and enlarged again in the early 14th century. At its final state of completion in the middle of the 14th century, the cathedral was one of the longest churches in the world, had one of the tallest spires and some of the finest stained glass; the presence of the shrine of Saint Erkenwald made the cathedral a site of pilgrimage during the Medieval Period. In addition to serving as the seat of the Diocese of London, the building developed a reputation as a social hub of the City of London, with the nave aisle, "Paul's walk", known as a centre for doing business and a place to hear the latest gossip on the London grapevine.
After the Reformation, the open-air pulpit in the churchyard, St Paul's Cross, became the stage for radical evangelical preaching and Protestant bookselling. The cathedral was in severe structural decline by the beginning of the 17th century. Restoration work begun by Inigo Jones in the 1620s was halted at the time of the English Civil War. Sir Christopher Wren was attempting another restoration in 1666 when the cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire of London. At that point, the old structure was demolished, the present, domed cathedral was erected on the site, with an English Baroque design by Wren. "Old" St Paul's Cathedral was the fourth church on the site at Ludgate Hill dedicated to St Paul. A devastating fire in 1087, detailed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, destroyed much of the city and the cathedral. King William I donated the stone from the destroyed Palatine Tower on the River Fleet towards the construction of a new, Romanesque Norman cathedral, an act sometimes said to be his last before death.
Bishop Maurice oversaw early preparations, although it was under his successor, Richard de Beaumis, that construction work commenced. Beaumis was assisted by King Henry I, who gave the bishop stone and commanded that all material brought up the River Fleet for the cathedral should be free from toll. To fund the cathedral, Henry gave Beaumis rights to all fish caught within the cathedral neighbourhood and tithes on venison taken in the County of Essex. Beaumis gave a site for the original foundation of St Paul's School. After Henry I's death, a civil war known as "The Anarchy" broke out. Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, was appointed to administer the affairs of St Paul's, he had to deal with the aftermath of a fire at London Bridge in 1135. It spread over much of the city, delaying its construction. During this period, the style of the building was changed from heavy Romanesque into Early English Gothic. Although the base Norman columns were left alone, lancet pointed arches were placed over them in the triforium and some heavy columns were substituted with clustered pillars.
The steeple was erected in 1221 and the cathedral was rededicated by Bishop Roger Niger in 1240. After a succession of storms, in 1255 Bishop Fulk Basset appealed for funds to repair the damaged roof; the roof was once more rebuilt in wood, to doom the building. At this time, the east end of the cathedral church was lengthened, enclosing the parish church of St Faith, now brought within the cathedral; the eastward addition was always referred to as "The New Work". After complaints from the dispossessed parishioners of St Faith's, the east end of the west crypt was allotted to them as their parish church; the congregation were allowed to keep a detached tower with a peal of bells east of the church, used to peal the summons to the Cheapside Folkmote. The parish moved to the Jesus chapel during the reign of Edward VI and was merged with St Augustine Watling Street after the 1666 fire; this "New Work" was completed in 1314, although the additions had been consecrated in 1300. Excavations in 1878 by Francis Penrose showed it was 100 feet wide.
By way of comparison, the current cathedral is 574 feet in length including the portico, 246 feet across the transepts, Winchester Cathedral, the longest remaining medieval church, is 556 feet long and 231 feet across the transepts. The cathedral had one of Europe's tallest church spires, the height of, traditionally given as 489 feet, surpassing all but Lincoln Cathedral; the King's Surveyor, Christopher Wren, gave 460 feet. William Benham noted that the cathedral "resembled in general outline that of Salisbury, but it was a hundred feet longer, the spire was sixty or eighty feet higher; the tower was open internally as far as the base of the spire, was more beautiful both inside and out than that of any other English cathedral."According to the architectural historian John Harvey, the octagonal chapter house, built about 1332 by William Ramsey, was the earliest example of Perpendicular Gothic. This is confirmed by Alec Clifton-Taylor, who notes that the chapter house and St Stephen's chapel at Westminster Abbey predate the early Perpendicular work at Gloucester Cathedral by several years.
The foundations of the chapter house were made visible in the redeveloped south churchyard of the
Dictionary of National Biography
The Dictionary of National Biography is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published since 1885. The updated Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was published on 23 September 2004 in 60 volumes and online, with 50,113 biographical articles covering 54,922 lives. Hoping to emulate national biographical collections published elsewhere in Europe, such as the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, in 1882 the publisher George Smith, of Smith, Elder & Co. planned a universal dictionary that would include biographical entries on individuals from world history. He approached Leslie Stephen editor of the Cornhill Magazine, owned by Smith, to become the editor. Stephen persuaded Smith that the work should focus only on subjects from the United Kingdom and its present and former colonies. An early working title was the Biographia Britannica, the name of an earlier eighteenth-century reference work; the first volume of the Dictionary of National Biography appeared on 1 January 1885.
In May 1891 Leslie Stephen resigned and Sidney Lee, Stephen's assistant editor from the beginning of the project, succeeded him as editor. A dedicated team of sub-editors and researchers worked under Stephen and Lee, combining a variety of talents from veteran journalists to young scholars who cut their academic teeth on dictionary articles at a time when postgraduate historical research in British universities was still in its infancy. While much of the dictionary was written in-house, the DNB relied on external contributors, who included several respected writers and scholars of the late nineteenth century. By 1900, more than 700 individuals had contributed to the work. Successive volumes appeared quarterly with complete punctuality until midsummer 1900, when the series closed with volume 63; the year of publication, the editor and the range of names in each volume is given below. Since the scope included only deceased figures, the DNB was soon extended by the issue of three supplementary volumes, covering subjects who had died between 1885 and 1900 or, overlooked in the original alphabetical sequence.
The supplements brought the whole work up to the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901. Corrections were added. After issuing a volume of errata in 1904, the dictionary was reissued with minor revisions in 22 volumes in 1908 and 1909. In the words of the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, the dictionary had "proved of inestimable service in elucidating the private annals of the British", providing not only concise lives of the notable deceased, but additionally lists of sources which were invaluable to researchers in a period when few libraries or collections of manuscripts had published catalogues or indices, the production of indices to periodical literatures was just beginning. Throughout the twentieth century, further volumes were published for those who had died on a decade-by-decade basis, beginning in 1912 with a supplement edited by Lee covering those who died between 1901 and 1911; the dictionary was transferred from its original publishers, Elder & Co. to Oxford University Press in 1917.
Until 1996, Oxford University Press continued to add further supplements featuring articles on subjects who had died during the twentieth century. The supplements published between 1912 and 1996 added about 6,000 lives of people who died in the twentieth century to the 29,120 in the 63 volumes of the original DNB. In 1993 a volume containing missing biographies was published; this had an additional 1,000 lives, selected from over 100,000 suggestions. This did not seek to replace any articles on existing DNB subjects though the original work had been written from a Victorian perspective and had become out of date due to changes in historical assessments and discoveries of new information during the twentieth century; the dictionary was becoming less and less useful as a reference work. In 1966, the University of London published a volume of corrections, cumulated from the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research. There were various versions of the Concise Dictionary of National Biography, which covered everyone in the main work but with much shorter articles.
The last edition, in three volumes, covered everyone who died before 1986. In the early 1990s Oxford University Press committed itself to overhauling the DNB. Work on what was known until 2001 as the New Dictionary of National Biography, or New DNB, began in 1992 under the editorship of Colin Matthew, professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Matthew decided that no subjects from the old dictionary would be excluded, however insignificant the subjects appeared to a late twentieth-century eye. Suggestions for new subjects were solicited through questionnaires placed in libraries and universities and, as the 1990s advanced and assessed by the editor, the 12 external consultant editors and several hundred associate editors and in-house staff. Digitization of the DNB was performed by the Alliance Photosetting Company in India; the new dictionary would cover British history, "broadly defined", up to 31 December 2000. The research project was conceived as a collaborative one, with in-house staff co-ordinating the work of
