Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 07.djvu/380

 his hands bound behind him (Chron. p. 204). His sentence was formally reversed 22 March 1399. The king and queen were enraged at his death, and Froissart grieved for him as a friend and as a wise and gentle knight. It is probable, from a list of his books, twenty-one in number, extracted from an inventory of his goods (8 Nov. 1387) ‘at the Mews and Baynard’s Castle,’ and preserved in manuscript (Add. MS. 25459, p. 206), that he was a man of some culture. His taste for romances of chivalry accounts for his intimacy with Froissart, and suggests that his ideas were those of the later days of Edward III, and that he owed his ruin to the extravagant tastes of the school in which he had been reared. There is a curious description in the ‘Issue Rolls’ of his bed (among his forfeited chattels) as ‘of green Tarteryn embroidered with ships and birds.’

 BURLEY, WALTER (1275–1345?), commentator on Aristotle in the fourteenth century, was born in the year 1274 or 1275 (, Catalogue of Lambeth MSS, No. 143). It seems more probable that he was, as Bale states, a secular priest than a Franciscan, as the ‘Bibliotheca Universalis Franciscana’ and Bass Mullinger assert him to have been, or an Augustinian as Gandulphus reports on the authority of Burley’s contemorary, Alphonso Vargas, archbishop of Seville. For Leland (Collectanea, iii. 54) gives his name among a list of the fellows of Merton in the days of Edward I; and there are reasons for believing him to have been a beneficed priest in the later years of his life.

According to Holinshed, Walter Burley was a kinsman of Sir Simon Burley [q. v.], and hence was a member of the Herefordshire family of that name. He studied at Merton College, Oxford, whence he removed to Paris, where he had William of Ockham for a fellow-student and Duns Scotus for a teacher. Duns is generally supposed to have been in Paris from 1304 to 1307 (, Die Scholastik des späteren Mittelalters, Bd. i. 8, 9). Stow tells us, without giving any authority, that Burley also studied in Germany, where he seems to have been a protégé of the Archbishop of Ulm, to whom in his old age, according to Gandulphus, he dedicated his shorter treatise on the ‘Ethics' (cf., Harl. MS 5415, and , iii. 414). It would seem from Stow's account that Burley was still abroad when his fame reached the ears of the young Princess Philippa of Hainault, who appointed him her almoner before coming to England in December 1327. In the early months of the same year (1327) we gather from Rymer that he was despatched on a special mission to the papal court for the purpose of pleading for the canonisation of Edward III's cousin, Thomas of Lancaster; and again in 1330, on which occasion he is styled ‘Professor Sacræ Paginæ.’ Wood makes him die in 1337 (Hist. Oxon. ii. 87), and this statement is repeated in a note to one of Burley’s manuscripts in the British Museum (Royal MS. 12 B xix.) This, however, is probably only a false inference from the passage in the treatise on Aristotle referred to above (Lambeth MS. 143), and Tanner may be right in his conjecture that Burley survived till 1345. Holinshed tells us that he was appointed tutor to the Black Prince when the young Edward was of an age ‘to learne his booke’ (cf. Harl. MS. 545, ff. 128-9). While acting in this capacity, he adds, Burley introduced his little kinsman, Simon, though the prince's junior by some six years, to the notice of his young charge. These events cannot well have been anterior to 1342, and Walter may perhaps have owed his new post to the influence of Richard de Bury, at this time bishop of Durham (1333-45), who had himself been tutor to Edward III. Chambre assures us that Burley was one of this relate‘s most intimate friends, a fact which renders it very probable that the Walter Burley whose name occurs as prebendary of Shalford in the diocese of Wells when Richard de Bury held this deanery (1332) was the Aristotelean commentator (, ii. 151, 199). In the household of the Bishop of Durham he must have made die acquaintance of Richard Fitz-Ralph, the future archbishop of Dublin, and ThomasBradwardine, like himself a fellow of Merton and soon to be archbishop of Canterbury. Tanner identifies him with a Walter de Burle who in August 134l became rector of Glemsford in exchange for Pighteslee in the diocese of Lincoln. Later (June 1342) Glemsford was resigned for Ashsted in the see of Winchester. Again, according to the same authority, still voting from the episcopal registers (Norwich), a certain Walter de Burley appears in 1345 begging to be appointed archdeacon of Richmond, but is refused on the plea that the office has already been filled up, whether this identification is right or not, Burley was certainly alive later than 