Grosseteste, ROBERT, Bishop of Lincoln, was born about 1175 at Stradbroke in Suffolk, of peasant parentage—Grosseteste (the French for 'great-head; Lat. capito) being a mere 'to-name.' Educated at Lincoln, Oxford, and Paris, he had for some years been the first teacher of theology in the Franciscan school at Oxford, and had held eight archdeaconries and other preferments, when in 1235 he was elected Bishop of Lincoln. He forthwith undertook in the most vigorous fashion the reformation of abuses, embroiling himself thereby first with his own chapter and next with Pope Innocent IV., whom he twice visited at Lyons, in 1244-46 and 1249-50. The pope granted English benefits to 'rascal Romans,' who drew indeed the revenues of their office, but never perhaps showed face in the country. This was intolerable to a man like Grosseteste, and he set himself strongly against it, incurring by his boldness a temporary suspension from the exercise of his episcopal functions, and a continual menace of excommunication. In the last year of Grosseteste's life, Innocent wrote to him ordering his nephew, a young Italian, to be promoted to the first canonry that should fall vacant at Lincoln, and accompanying his injunction with threats. The bishop was filled with indignation, and at once wrote a letter declaring that he would not obey such precepts even though they should issue from 'the highest order of angels,' and likening the pope's nepotism to the sin of Lucifer and Antichrist. Innocent, transported with fury, excommunicated him; but Grosseteste quietly appealed to Christ's own throne, and troubled himself no more about the matter. The feeling of the English nation sustained him; his clergy went on obeying him as if nothing had happened; and on his death at Buckden, near Huntingdon, 9th October 1253, Archbishop Boniface himself officiated at his funeral in Lincoln Cathedral. Such is the current account, against which Lingard objects that the mandate came not from the pope but the nuncio; that Innocent, on receiving Grosseteste's reply, not only rescinded the order, but adopted measures for the reform of these abuses; and that the story of Grosseteste's dying under sentence of excommunication rests on very questionable authority.
Grosseteste often is claimed as a pre-Reformation reformer; but his reforms were in the direction not of doctrine, but discipline. In politics he was a constitutionalist, a friend of Simon de Montfort. His learning was prodigious; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, mechanics, and music were among his attainments; whilst his knowledge of the Scriptures was profound. Pegge's catalogue of his works, of which only a few have been published, fills 25 closely-printed quarto pages, and exhibits 'treatises on sound, notion, heat, colour, form, angles, atmospheric pressure, poison, the rainbow, comets, light, as well as on the astrolabe, necromancy, and witchcraft.' See Brewer's Monumenta Franciscana
(1858); Luard's edition of Grosseteste's Latin letters (Record Soc., 1862); and Perry's Life and Times of Grosseteste (S.P.C.K., 1871).