TWO LIVES OF ARCHBISHOP CHICHELE.'

BY E. F. JACOB, M.A., D.PHIL.,

PROFESSOR OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER.

HE existing memorials of are his register, his T breviary, his College and his tomb. From them much is to be gathered about his orderly and systematic mind, his devotion to learning, his sense of dignified beauty ; they reveal hi sharing the more progressive educational and cesthetic traditions of his day ; a careful administrator, precise and orderly in language that seldom leaves the cool tenor of its usual formality for the warmth of conviction and experience ; a sound leader of the Church, pious and liberal ; a great institutional figure, perhaps, rather than a great human being. Can we recover the patient spirit that lived through a brief age of glory into many long years of anti-climax ? Or must we confess to having lost him among events and more vivid than himself ? For Chichele was neither vivid nor striking : he was not the subject of any contemporaly biography. He did not stir the monastic pulse like Duke Humphrey-Walsingham dismisses him with a growl-nor cause the lawyer's eye to sparkle, as men like Sir William Gascoigne or Fortescue or Lyndwood. No humanists sent him translations ; representations of him are not plentiful ; in the pleasantest of them, Herman the illuminator has thought fit to frame him amongst his white-taped clerks in the initial capital of his breviary,' An elaboration OF the Lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on the 10th March, 1932. a MS. hbeth, 69, fol. i ; M. R. James and C. Jenkins, Catalogue of the MSS. in the Library of Lanzbeth, i, 109. On Herman's illustrations, cf. E. G.Millar in Bulletin de la sonYt6 fran~aisepourla rt'production des manusmit.r, 1924, and the remarks of S. C. Cockerell in Burlington Fine Arts Club Catalogue (1 908), no. 148. 428 TWO LIVES OF ARCHBISHOP CHICHELE 429 and to depict him in the act of dedicating a church '-at his ordinary tasks and duties on either occasion : little vignettes of barely three inches square. Not striking, then, but certainly significant. Chichele's tenure of Canterbury was longer than that of any Archbishop before or after him, Boniface of Savoy and not excepted : just short of twenty-nine years, and they are the years of the Conciliar Move- ment and the almost concurrent papal reaction, of heresy in the dioceses and faction in the Council at home, conquest and aching responsibilities abroad. To write his biography, it is not enough to go deeply into his administrative life alone ; one must know and feel that background and its strain. Only two writers have faced the task, a Jacobean lawyer and a Victorian dean. Both have treated their subject seriously and well, though it is curious to find how much more sympathy the earlier work excites. Sir Arthur Duck, who in 16 1 7 published his Life of the Archbishop in clear and effortless Latin, was a Devonshire man, a scholar of College, elected to Chichele's foundation of All Souls during Hoveden's wardenship in 1604. He became one of the two bursars in 1608,a and Sub- Warden in 1610,4 the same year that the Visitor (Archbishop Bancroft) removed Whitgift's injunction that any member of the College who practised civil law outside the University was to lose his fellowship." This set Duck free to become (1 614) an advocate in Doctors Commons, where he resided for the remainder of his days. AS an ecclesiastical lawyer he played an important part as Chancellor of the Diocese of London and a member of the Ecclesiastical Com- mission! In his only other surviving book, the De autko~itateju7i.s MS. Lambeth, 69, fol. 192 v. For other representations at Higham Ferrers, All Souls, and in Thomas Chandler's MS. at New College, see J. H. Wylie, Henvy V, i, 302 n., giving bibliography. Vita Henria' Chichele, Arclziepiscopi Cantuariensis, sub regibus Henvic: 5/' et Vr; Descripta ab Arthuro Duck, LL.D. (, Joseph Barnes), referred to here as Vita. An English translation of 1699 (London, Richard Chiswell) follows the Latin reprint of 1681, but like tlle latter prints a number of Duck's marginal references to his authorities inaccurately. C. T. Martin, Catalogue of the Archives . . . of All Souls College (1 877) p. 309. Ibid. p. 3 10. lbid. There is a perfunctory life of Duck in Dict. Nat. Biog., vi, 87-8, the author of which makes no reference to the AU Souls' Archives, and mainly refers the reader to the Calendar of State Papers Domestic.