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Robert Grosseteste was born at Stradbrook in Suffolk about the year 1175. His parents were humble people, and it was due to the aid of friends that he was able to go to Oxford and later to Paris. He became renowned for his learning and, on his return to Oxford, was rapidly promoted to a controlling post at that institution.

If Grosseteste had possessed any inclination to secular activity, he would have become the greatest man of the century. But his nobly proportioned head with its massive brow (from which came his name) was the head of a scholar. His understanding of science was so profound that he started Roger Bacon on the path to his great discoveries. He was a preacher of mighty power and eloquence. Above everything else, he was a man of sublime courage: the unrelenting critic of the King, a thorn in the side of popes, a rod for the backs of venal churchman and indulgent monk.

In the year 1235 he was elected Bishop of Lincoln, which at that time was the largest see in England, comprising Lincoln, Leicester, Buckingham, Bedford, Stow, Huntingdon, Northampton, and Oxford. The clergy had fallen into slack ways, and the new broom wielded with furious energy by the venerable man with the forehead of a dreamer but the zeal of a crusader swept out concubinage (the flaunting of it, at least), drinking, loose ways of living. He put a stop to such profane practices as the holding of games in churchyards, the Feast of Fools (a form of mummery at which many priests had been disposed to wink), the soft indulgences of refectory and chapter house. To accomplish these reforms it was necessary to visit the monasteries in his extensive province and, as a result of what he observed, he lopped off the heads of many abbots and priors. Rumblings of discontent rose on all sides, and even the canons of his own chapter at Lincoln became bitterly antagonistic. They denied his right to make visitations and carried their case to Rome. The feud continued for six years, and even when Pope Innocent IV gave a decision in favor of the bishop the stubborn canons refused to give in with good grace.

Grosseteste was the great opponent of plurality. When the King desired to make John Mansel the prebend of Thane, the bishop came up to London and threatened to excommunicate the acquisitive royal clerk if he did not withdraw at once. Mansel not only resigned his pretensions in a great hurry but persuaded the King to give in as well. Once Grosseteste threatened also to lay the royal chapel at Westminster under an interdict because of some slyness the King was up to, and Henry retreated quickly.

It was the determination of Rome to treat England as a fief and to demand an ever-increasing share of its revenues which roused the fighting bishop to his most courageous stand. He opposed the appointment of Italians to benefices in his territory and made visits to the papal court to protest against such exactions. On one of these visits, when Innocent IV was in temporary exile at Lyons, he preached a sermon denouncing the evils existing within the shadow of the Vatican and roused Innocent to an almost incoherent state of indignation. On returning to England after this bold defiance of the head of the Church, the bishop began an investigation which uncovered the fact that Rome was taking out of England each year the sum of seventy thousand marks, which was three times larger than the income of the King; and with this weapon in his hands he thundered still more boldly against the policy of the Vatican, not concerned that Pope and King were in alliance and equally resentful of his attitude.

Through it all he remained in high standing even with those he attacked most openly and persistently. He was on friendly personal terms with the King, his advice was sought by the Queen on occasions, he carried on a voluminous correspondence with the prominent men of the country, the cardinals protected him from any hostile action as a result of the Pope’s resentment.

Shortly before his death in 1253 he received through the papal commissioners an order to appoint to a canonry at Lincoln a nephew of the Pope, Frederick of Lavagna. The demand was couched in the most positive terms and carried the obnoxious clause Non obstante. The stouthearted bishop decided to disregard precedent by refusing, and his decision was conveyed in a letter to the papal executor which has been kept and studied down the centuries as a model of reasoning and firmness. He made his chief point that to continue the filling of important posts in the Church with Italians who could not speak the language and would never set foot in the country would make it impossible for the Church to minister properly to the spiritual needs of the people. No faithful subject of the Holy See, he declared, could submit to such mandates, not even if they came from “the most high body of angels.” He went on to protest that “as an obedient man, I disobey, I contradict, I rebel!”

Innocent IV literally boiled over when this letter reached his hands. “This raving old man, this deaf and foolish dotard!” he cried. He went on to say that the English bishop had gone too far this time. He would be punished as he deserved. A command would be sent to the King of England for his prompt arrest. The punishment he would receive would make him a horror to the whole world.

One of the cardinals, Giles the Spaniard, had enough independence to advise against any action. Grosseteste, he said, was “a holy man, more religious and of a more correct life than ourselves.” Other cardinals joined in with the same opinion. The Pope, refusing to look at them, as was his custom when annoyed, grumblingly gave in. The letter, unanswered, was committed to the files. For once the imperious Non obstante! was disregarded and Frederick of Lavagna had to be provided for elsewhere.

Even if Innocent had decided to discipline the outspoken bishop it would have been of no avail, for while the cardinals discussed his case that stouthearted man was dying at his manor in Buckden. On the night of St. David’s Day he breathed his last. He had lived seventy-eight years and in every conscious moment of his long span of existence he had been selfless, resolute, clear-seeing, filled with the kind of faith which knows when to warn and does not hesitate to oppose. The world had lost its soundest teacher, the Church its finest son.

The night he died Faulkes, Bishop of London, heard a sound in the air like the ringing of a great convent bell. He roused himself and said this could mean only one thing, that the noble Robert of Lincoln had died. Some Franciscan monks, passing through the royal forest of Vauberge, heard the same bell tolling.

Innocent IV had a different kind of intimation of the passing of his venerable enemy. He dreamed that Grosseteste came to him and wounded him in the side; and for the rest of the time that he had left of his own life he insisted he could feel the effects of the blow.