III - Contest with and victory over the regular Chapter of Canterbury.

Summary

While Bishop Grossetete's suit with his Chapter was carrying on another started up, which tho begun later, was sooner terminated. This second controversy, was with W. Abbot of Bardney, one of the ancientist monasteries in the Kingdom, on the River Witham a little below Lincoln and incidently with the monastick Chapter of Canterbury. The Abbot of Bardney being in contest with Doctor Thomas the Welchman, Archdeacon of Lincoln, who in 1234 [or] 2 endeavoured to make the said Abbot pay a debt of his predecessor’s, the cause was brought by the Archdeacon before the Bishop. Thereupon the Abbot interjected an appeal, but the Bishop laid him under an excommunication, and Matthew Paris saith he did it in great wrath, as being an enemy to the privileges of regulars. But as the Bishop of Lincoln allowed of the just and authentick privileges, soe he was an enemy to pretended ones, and this as we have just seen as well in his own secular as in regular chapters. However the excommunicated Abbot appealed to the Chapter of Canterbury, which as Metropolitical Chapter pretended to a power of receiving appeals, a gravamina, during the double vacancy of the sees of Canterbury and Rome. This pretension was opposed not only by the Bishop of Lincoln but by all the bishops of the realm who leagued themselves against the Kentish Chapter. Hence our Prelate, after appealing to the Holy See against the Abbot's appeal to Canterbury, deposed the refractory appealing Abbot. In the meantime, the Chapter of Canterbury received the Abbot of Bardney's appeal, and presumed even to excommunicate the Bishop of Lincoln with his fellow Bishop and quondam school-fellow Richard de Wendover, Doctor of Theology of the University of Paris and now Bishop of Rochester. On this sentence of the Chapter being notified to our Prelate, he took the paper and tramped it under his feet adding withal, if we believe Matthew Paris, these words. ‘May these monks never pray for me any otherwise (than by their excommunications).’ A saying more agreeable to Matthew's warm and satyrical temper, who makes the Bishop sometimes speak as himself would do in like occasion rather than to the character of our meek tho firm Prelate.