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 further accusing him of contumacy, and declaring that if he continued in his errors he should be excommunicated, handed over to the civil authority, and kept in custody until he recanted and had paid the expenses of the proceedings undertaken against him. This bull seems also to have remained in abeyance. Norris, having, however, exceeded his term of seven years' absence from his benefice, was proceeded against under the statute of Richard II regarding Irish absentees. The profit of his benefice at Dundalk was distrained by order of the court of exchequer, and two-thirds of it forfeited to the crown. On his return to Ireland he was made prebendary at Yago (St. Jago), in the county of Kildare, and in 1457 dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin. For about seven years previous to his death in 1465 his health was very precarious, and he was incapable of making his will. He is credited with the authorship of 1. ‘Declamationes quædam.’ 2. ‘Lecturæ Scripturarum.’ 3. ‘Contra Mendicitatem Validam,’ none of which are known to be extant.

 NORRIS, ROBERT (d. 1791), African traveller, son of John Norris of Nonsuch, Wiltshire, and brother of William Norris, secretary to the Society of Antiquaries [q. v.], was a Guinea trader, whose personal knowledge of the African coast appears to have reached back at least to 1755 (Memoir, p. 120). In February 1772 he visited the king of Dahomey. He was well received, and gives a curious account of the country and its murderous ‘customs.’ He revisited it in December of the same year. In 1788, when, owing to the vigorous action of the advocates of abolition, a committee of the privy council was appointed to inquire into the slave question, Norris was delegated to lay before it the views of the Liverpool trade, a circumstance which probably led to the publication of his ‘Memoir of the Reign of Bossa Ahadée, King of Dahomey … with an Account of the Author's Visit to Abomey, the Capital, and a Short Account [2nd edition] of the African Slave Trade’ (London, 1789). His account of the slave trade is a defence of slavery. A map of the African coast between Capes Verga and Formosa is indexed under the same name and date in the British Museum maps. Norris died in Liverpool (from the effects of a damp bed on his journey from London) on 27 Nov. 1791.

 NORRIS, NORREYS, or NOREIS, ROGER (d. 1223), abbot of Evesham, was a monk of Christchurch, Canterbury, at the time when Archbishop Baldwin (d. 1190) [q. v.] was endeavouring to make his authority prevail in the government of the convent against the strenuous resistance of the monks. In 1187 Norris was one of the three treasurers of the convent (Ep. Cant. Rolls Ser. No. xcvi), and was, with the aged sacristan Robert, deputed to appeal to Henry II, who was then in France, against the archbishop's pretensions. They were expressly warned by the convent to refuse to hold office from the archbishop, but while at Alençon they treacherously agreed to acknowledge his sway (ib. No. cxi), and the king regarded them as fully authorised to treat for the convent (ib. No. cxiv). Norris was accordingly made cellarer by the archbishop. On 28 Aug. 1187 he returned home, but the convent refused to acknowledge his title to the office, and confined him in the infirmary. At the end of January 1188 he escaped through the sewer of the monastery, and joined the archbishop at Otford ( i. 404). On 6 Oct. Baldwin appointed him prior of the convent. On 8 Nov. the convent assembled before the king at Westminster and asked for Roger's removal. A compromise was arrived at: the convent begged the archbishop's pardon, and Roger, whose character was notoriously bad, was deposed.

In 1191, through the agency of King Richard I (Chron. Evesham, p. 103), he became abbot of Evesham, and was consecrated by William, bishop of Worcester (ib. p. 134). For four years he tyrannised over the abbey, and then complaint was made to Archbishop Hubert as legate. Norris escaped retribution by bribery, amended his ways for a year, and made friends with great men, especially the chief justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter; and when in 1198 a second complaint was made, he was able to hush the matter up. In 1202 he had to cope with the question of the Bishop of Worcester's right to visit the abbey. By skilfully playing off the jealousy of the monks against the bishop, Norris succeeded both in excluding the bishop and tightening his own hold on the abbacy. He was thus free to continue his oppressions, which took the usual form of depriving the convent of its share of the estates. The monks, led by Thomas de Marleberge [q. v.], made efforts to recover their property; but in 1203, when inquiry was