B I S 



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B I S 



and the bishop was elected by them assembled in chapter. 

 The nomination of such an important officer v?as however 

 an object of great importance to the temporal sovereigns, 

 and they so far interfered that at length they virtually ob- 

 tained the nomination. In England there is still the shadow 

 of an election by the chapters in the cathedrals. When a 

 bishop dies the event is certified to the king by the chapter. 

 The king writes to tho chapter that they proceed to elect a 

 successor. This letter is called the conge d'elire. The king, 

 however, transmits to them at the same time the name of 

 some person whom he expects them to elect. If within a 

 short time they do not proceed to the election, the king 

 may nominate by his own authority ; if they elect any other 

 than the person named in the king's writ, they incur the 

 severe penalties of a prcemunire, which includes forfeiture 

 of goods, outlawry, and other evils. The bishop thus elected 

 is confirmed in his new office under a royal commission, 

 when he takes the oaths of allegiance, supremacy, canonical 

 obedience, and against simony. He is next installed, and 

 finally consecrated, which is performed by the archbishop or 

 some other bishop named in a commission for the purpose, 

 a>sisted by two other bishops. No person can be elected a 

 bishop who is under thirty years of age. 



Most of the bishops in England are amply endowed. 

 Their churches, which are called cathedrals, (from cathedra, 

 a seat of dignity,) are noble and splendid edifices, the un- 

 impeachable witnesses remaining among us of the wealth, 

 the splendour, and the architectural skill of the ecclesiastics 

 of England in the middle ages. The cathedral of the 

 Bishop of London is the only modern edifice. 



For other information on this subject, see ARCHBISHOP 

 and ARCHDEACON. 



Biihops in par/ibus. This is an elliptical phrase, and is 

 to be supplied with the word Infidelium. These are bishops 

 who have no actual see, but who are consecrated as if 

 they had, under the fiction that they are bishops in succes- 

 sion to those who were the actual bishops in cities where 

 Christianity is extinct. Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, and 

 the northern coast of Africa, present many of these extinct 

 sees, some of them the most antient and most interesting 

 in the history of Christianity. When a Christian mission- 

 ary is to be sent forth in the character of a bishop into a 

 country imperfectly Christianized, and where the converts 

 are not brought into any regular church order, the pope does 

 not consecrate the missionary as the bishop of that country 

 in which his services are required, but as the bishop of one of 

 the extinct sees, who is supposed to have left his diocese 

 and to be travelling in those pails. So, when England had 

 broken off from the Catholic Church, and yet continued its 

 own unbroken series of bishops in the recognized English 

 sees, it was, for Catholic ecclesiastical affairs, divided into 

 ditricts, over each of which a bishop has been placed, who 

 is a bhhnp in partibus. Thus, Dr. Baines, the actual 

 bishop of the western district, is the bishop of Siga, an ex- 

 tinct African see. When, in the time of King Charles I., 

 Dr. Richard Smith was sent by the pope into England in 

 the character of bishop, he came as bishop of Chalcedon. 



The English church has not adopted this plan ; but the 

 bishops who have been sent to Nova Scotia, to Quebec, and 

 to the East and West Indies, have been named from the 

 countries placed under their spiritual superintendency, or 

 from the city which contains their residence and the cathe- 

 dral church. 



Suffragan bishops. In England, every bishop is, in cer- 

 tain views of Ins character and position, regarded as a 

 suffragan of tha archbishop in whose province he is. But 

 the suffragan bishop is rather to be understood as a bishop 

 in parlibus, who was admitted by the English bishops 

 before the Reformation to assist them in the performance of 

 the duties of their office. When a bishop filled some high 

 office of state, the assistance of a suffragan was almost es- 

 sential, and was probably usually conceded by the pope, to 

 whom such matters belonged, when asked for. A cata- 

 logue of persons who have been suffragan bishops in Eng- 

 land was made by Wharton, a great ecclesiastical anti- 

 quary, and is printed in an appendix to a Dissertation on 

 bishops in partibus, published in 1784 by another distin- 

 guished cburch-antiquary, Dr. Samuel Pegge. 



At the Reformation, provision was made for a body of 

 suffragans. The act 26 Henry VIII. c. 14. is expressly on 

 this subject. It authorises each archbishop and bishop to 

 name a suffragan, which is to be done in this manner: he 

 is to present the names of two clerks to the king, one of 



whom the king is to select. He was no longer to be named 

 from some extinct see, but from some town within the 

 realm. Six and twenty places are named as the seats 

 (nominally) of the suffragan bishops. They were these 

 which follow : 



Thetford, Shaftesbury, Bristol, Cambridge 



Ipswich, Molton, Penrith, Pereth, 



Colchester, Marlborough, Bridgewater, Berwick, 

 Dover, Bedford, Nottingham, St. Germains, 



Guilford, Leicester, Grantham, and the 



Southampton, Gloucester, Hull, Isle of Wight. 



Taunton, Shrewsbury, Huntingdon, 



This was before the establishment of the six new bishop- 

 rics. 



Very few persons were nominated suffragan bishops under 

 this act. One, whose name was Robert Pursglove, who had 

 been an abbot, and who was a friend to education, was 

 suffragan bishop of Hull. He died in 1579, and lies in- 

 terred in the church of Tideswell in Derbyshire, under a 

 sumptuous tomb, on which is his efligy in the episcopal cos- 

 tume with a long rhyming inscription presenting an ac- 

 count, curious as being contemporary, of the places at which 

 he received his education, and the ecclesiastical offices which 

 in succession he filled. 



Boy-bishop. In the cathedral and other greater churches, 

 it was usual on St. Nicholas-day to elect a child, usually 

 one of the children of the choir, bishop, and to invest him 

 with the robes and other insignia of the episcopal office ; 

 and he continued from that day (Dec. 6)f to the feast of the 

 Holy Innocents (Dec. 28), to practise a kind of mimicry of 

 the ceremonies in which the bishop usually officiated, more 

 for the amusement than to the edification of the people. 

 The custom, strange as it was, existed in the churches on 

 the continent as well as in England. It may be traced to 

 a remote period. It was countenanced by the great eccle- 

 siastics themselves, and in their foundation they sometimes 

 even made provision for these ceremonies. This was the 

 case with the archbishop of York in the reign of Henry 

 VII., when he founded his college at Rotherhara. Little 

 can be said in favour of such exhibitions, but that they 

 served to abate the dreariness of mid-winter. Much may be 

 found collected on this subject in Ellis's edition of Brand's 

 Popular Antiquities, vol. i. pp. 328-336. The custom 

 was finally suppressed by a proclamation of Henry VIII. 

 in 1542. 



BISHOPRIC is a term equivalent to diocese or see, de- 

 noting the whole district through which the bishop's su- 

 perintendency extends. The final syllable is the Anglo- 

 Saxon mce, region, which entered in like manner into the 

 composition of one or two other words. 



In England there are two archbishoprics, and twenty 

 bishoprics : in Wales, four bishoprics ; the Isle of Man forms 

 also a bishopric, but the bishop has no seat in the English 

 parliament. 



The basis of the present diocesan distribution of England 

 was laid in the times of the Saxon Heptarchy. At the 

 Conquest there were two archbishoprics and thirteen bi- 

 shoprics, viz. : 



Canterbury, Rochester, Hereford, 



York, Salisbury, Covntry and Lichfield, 



London, Bath and Wells, Lincoln, 



Winchester, Exeter, Norwich, 



Chichester, Worcester, Durham. 



The first innovation on this arrangement was mixda by 

 King Henry I., who, to gratify the abbot of the antient 

 Saxon foundation at Ely, and to free him from the super- 

 intendence of the bishop of Lincoln, in whose diocese he 

 was, erected Ely into a bishopric, the church of the mo- 

 nastery being made the cathedral. He assigned to it as its 

 diocese the county of Cambridge and some portion of Nor- 

 folk, perhaps as much as had formerly been comprehended 

 within Mercia, for we have no better guide to the exact 

 limits of the antient Saxon kingdoms than the limitations 

 of the antient dioceses. This was effected in 1 1 09. 



The second was in 1133, near the end of the reign of 

 Henry I., when the see of Carlisle was founded. The dio- 

 cese consists of portions of the counties of Cumberland and 

 Westmoreland, perhaps not before comprehended within 

 any English diocese. 



No other change took place till 1541, when King Henry 

 VIII. erected six new bishoprics, facilities for doing so 

 bcnng afforded by the dissolution of the monastic establish- 

 ments, which placed at the king's disposal large and 



