“There is scarcely a character in English history whose fame has been more constant, both during and after his life, than Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253. As we find his advice sought universally during his lifetime, and his example spoken of as that which almost all the other prelates of his day followed, so was it also after his death. If threats from Rome and excommunications from Canterbury fell harmlessly upon him while alive, his example nerved others in subsequent years--as in the case of Sewal, Archbishop of York--to bear even worse attacks without giving way. And probably no one has had a greater influence upon English thought and English literature for the two centuries which followed his time; few books will be found that do not contain some quotations from Lincolniensis, ‘the great clerk, Grostest.’”[33] A Suffolk man was Grosseteste, and born of humble parents. Sent to Oxford by his friends he becomes master of the schools and chancellor of the university--the foremost scholar of his day--receives various ecclesiastical preferments, and at the age of sixty is freely elected by the chapter of Lincoln as their bishop. If the canons of Lincoln believed that Grosseteste’s age would ensure comparative quiet for the diocese and a continuance of the loose order of his immediate predecessors, they were speedily undeceived. Grosseteste brought into Lincoln an energy for religion that disturbed the easy-going monks, with their comfortable common-room life, and altogether upset the secular clergy with their illegal marriages and their parochial revellings. In the first year of his authority Grosseteste’s letter to his archdeacons, followed by his diocesan constitutions, shows the hand of the reformer. He calls attention to the neglect of the canonical hours of prayer--certain clergy “fearing not God nor regarding man, either do not say the canonical hours or say them in mutilated fashion, and that without any sign of devotion, or at an hour more suitable to their own desires than convenient to their parishioners”--to the private marriages of many priests, to the strife and bloodshed and desecration caused by the miracle plays in churchyards, and to the drunkenness and gluttony attendant on funeral feasts. Grosseteste also complains that the parochial clergy oppose the preaching friars, “maliciously hindering the people from hearing the sermons of the friars, and permitting those to preach who make a trade of it, and who only preach such things as may draw money.” Incidentally, and with a curiously modern touch, Grosseteste urges his archdeacons to warn mothers and nurses against overlaying their children at night, for it seems many infants were suffocated in this way.