But the schools here had won a very great reputation in the current of the thirteenth century, largely through the scholarship and popularity of Grosseteste, one while Bishop of Lincoln, who held ministrations at Oxford by reason of his connection with a Franciscan brotherhood established here; and among those crop-haired Franciscans was a monk--whom we have made this visit to Oxford to find--named Roger Bacon. He had been not only student but teacher there; and a few miles south from the King’s Arms Hotel in Broad Street, Oxford, is still standing a church tower, in the little parish of Sunningwell, from which--as tradition affirms--Roger Bacon studied the heavens: for he believed in Astrology, and believed too in the transmutation of metals; and he got the name of magician, and was cashiered and imprisoned twice or thrice for this and other strange beliefs. But he believed most of all in the full utterance of his beliefs, and in experimenting, and in interrogating nature, and distrusting conventionalisms, and in search for himself into all the mysteries, whether of nature or theology. He had sprung from worthy and well-to-do parents in the Western County of Somersetshire. He had spent very much money for those days on his education; had obtained a Doctorate at Paris; his acuteness and his capacity for study were everywhere recognized; he knew more of Greek than most of his teachers, and more of Hebrew than most of the Rabbis, and more of Chemistry and Physics generally than probably any other man in England. He took a Friar’s vows, as we have said; but these did not save him from interdiction by the Chief of his Order, by whom he was placed under ten years of surveillance at Paris--his teachings silenced, and he suffering almost to starvation. A liberal Pope (for those days), Clement IV., by his intervention set free the philosopher’s pen again; and there came of this freedom the _Opus Majus_ by which he is most worthily known. Subsequently he was permitted to return to his old sphere of study in Oxford, where he pursued afresh his scientific investigations, but coupled with them such outspoken denunciations of the vices and ignorance of his brother Friars, as to provoke new condemnation and an imprisonment that lasted for fourteen years--paying thus, in this accredited mediæval way, for his freedom of speech.