A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



his own horse cost 12*., and the shoeing of his two horses before his 

 journey to Winchester cost 1 6 pence. ' Mete and drynke for himself 

 and servant, together with horse's mete' and other necessary expenses 

 from London to Winchester, and tarrying there from 7 to 1 2 February, 

 and from thence homeward, is put down at 23*. 4^. This was Dr. 

 Hede's expenditure when he went down to make preliminary prepar- 

 ations for the official visitation. Amongst the later entries may be 

 mentioned : ' For fyre and candyll and brede and ale in my chamber 

 in the Inne by cause I had no chamber in the Abbey of Saint 

 Swithun's in the tyme of their visitation, ijs. vjd.' 1 



Langton was followed by another much translated bishop. Richard 

 Fox when a young man had done Henry VII. (as Earl of Richmond) 

 many substantial services. On Courtenay's translation to Winchester in 

 1487, Fox succeeded him at Exeter ; he was moved to Bath and Wells 

 in 1492 and to Durham in 1494. The income of the bishopric of 

 Winchester was at this time greater than that of Durham, and its near- 

 ness to London made it pleasanter for a confidential friend of the king, 

 so Richard Fox came south and ruled over this diocese for nearly twenty- 

 eight years. When he had been Bishop of Winchester for nine years, 

 Henry VIII. (whom he had baptized at his birth) came to the throne, 

 but the bishop died before the upheavals that characterized the latter part 

 of that reign. Fox was most staunchly orthodox, and had some sorry 

 work to do with the heretics of his diocese. The burning of Thomas 

 Denys in the midst of the market place of Kingston, on 5 March, 

 1512-3, is set forth with a great deal of circumstance and detail in his 

 register. From the same source we learn that Thomas Watt and Anne 

 his wife of Dogmersfield, and William Wikham and Alice his wife, and 

 Robert Winter of Crondal, appeared before Bishop Fox in the parish 

 church of Farnham on 30 September, 1514, on the charge of heresy, 

 but having confessed and solemnly abjured their errors, penance was 

 assigned them and they received absolution. 2 



Fox was most generous with his great income, but chiefly outside 

 the diocese. He is remembered as the founder of Corpus Christi 

 College, Oxford. For nearly the last ten years of his life the bishop 

 was afflicted with blindness, and lived constantly at Wolvesey, but two 

 or three years before this trial had begun the bishop had sickened of 

 court life. 



There is nothing more creditable to Fox than the latter part of his 

 life, when he saw so clearly in advance of his time the inconsistency 

 of attempting to serve zealously both State and Church. Both Wolsey 

 and the king had great difficulty in keeping him to his seat at the 

 council table. In a letter he wrote to Wolsey on 23 April, 1516, he 

 excused himself from coming to court, as he had the king's license to be 



From transcripts of a Register SeJe vacanle at Canterbury, made by Mr.Leland L. Duncan, F.S.A. 

 Wmton. Epis. Reg., Fox, iii. 69-76. It is not a little curious that the martyrdom of Denys and 

 the whole of Bishop Fox's proceedings against heretics escaped Fox the martyrologist. A burning at 

 Kingston-on-Thames would not fail to be notorious. 



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