Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 02.djvu/391

Bacon terminate petitions from Gascony, Ireland, Wales, and the foreign isles in the parliament held at York. The same year, in conjunction with two others, he was deputed to assess the tallages for Norfolk and Suffolk. He seems to have continued a judge till 1336, and was possibly still living in the year 1339.

[Foss's Judges of England, iii. 393; Rot. Parl. ii.68, 447.]  BACON, alias, THOMAS (1592-1637), Jesuit. [See .]

BACONTHORPE, BACON, or BACHO, JOHN (d. 1346), the 'Resolute Doctor,' took his name from Baconsthorpe, a small Norfolk village in the hundred of South Erpingham. According to the elaborate genealogy of the Bacon family among the British Museum manuscripts (Add. MS. 19116) he was the third son of Sir Thomas Bacon of Baconsthorpe, and grandnephew of the famous Roger Bacon. In the early years of his life he was brought up at the newly founded Carmelite monastery of Blakeney or Snitterley, not far from Walsingham, an establishment which reckoned a Sir Robert Bacon amongst its earliest patrons. In process of time John Baconthorpe removed to Oxford, where the Carmelite order had possessed its own schools since 1253. According to Pits, he remained here only long enough to complete his philosophical training, and to pass through the initiatory stages of the theological course; while, to perfect himself in this crowning branch of mediæval study, he repaired to Paris. At this university he took his degree in both civil and ecclesiastical law, and applied himself to master every field of learning. The wide range of his inquiries is proved by the titles of his works, which, besides the ordinary theological and logical topics of the age, embrace treatises on astronomy or astrology, on the pontifical canons, on generation, the movement of animals, and innumerable other subjects. At Paris he seems to have first displayed that marked adherence to the doctrines of Averroes which gained him the title of 'Princeps Averroistarum.' But M. Renan is explicit in his statement that Baconthorpe does not so much maintain all the tenets of Averroes as strive to palliate their heterodoxy. His position was that the arguments of Thomas Aquinas and others had little that was contradictory to the real sentiments of the Arab philosopher. Averroes, according to his fourteenth-century champion, only started questions from a purely intellectual point of view, as a field in which to exercise men's reasoning faculties, without committing himself to a full acceptance of the theories he discussed. At the same time M. Renan adds that Baconthorpe was careful to soften down the more dangerous of his master's doctrines.

On his return from Paris, Baconthorpe was most probably once more a resident at Oxford, and it may be to this period of his life that Wood refers when he speaks of him as a strong opponent of the mendicant orders in that university. It would be about the same time that Baconthorpe was the Oxford instructor and friend of Richard Fitzralph, afterwards archbishop of Armagh (ob. 1360). According to Bale the two friends began about the year 1321 to preach the doctrines which Wycliffe inculcated so strongly half a century later, that the priestly power should be subordinate to the kingly - a statement which well agrees with the words of Walden when writing against the Lollards on the same subject: 'The great defender of this opinion is Richard of Armagh, and he follows John "Bacon-town" (Joannem Baconis oppidi) the Carmilite.' But Baconthorpe does not seem to have remained entirely in England, as his name is said to occur in the accounts of the general meeting of the Carmelites held at Alby in 1327; and again, in the general chapter of the order at Valence (1330), he once more appears as 'John de Baconstop, provincial of England' (Biblioth. Carmel. i. 743). The appellation of ' provincial' is due to the fact that in the preceding year he had, at a meeting of the Carmelite brotherhood in London, been unanimously elected head of the order in England (1329), an office which he retained till 1333, when he was hurriedly summoned to Rome. He seems to have given some offence to the heads of his own body by assigning too much authority to the pope in the matter of annulling marriages. We are told that at Rome he was even hissed during one of his discourses; but not, Leland assures us, for any lack of argumentative power or eloquence. Fuller, however, though apparently without authority, says that it was the badness of his Latin and of his pronunciation that formed the pretext for this treatment. Baconthorpe seems soon to have seen the error of his ways, and made a recantation, proving most conclusively that the pope had no power of dispensation within the prohibited degrees. Two centuries later, we are told by Bale, James Calcus Papiensis made use of Baconthorpe's authority in his work on Henry VIII's divorce. From this time Baconthorpe's fame seems to have been established. Even after the lapse of 150 years the general of his order, Spagnuoli, could sing of him as the great