tores,' of which body Robert was a member, whereas Roger Bacon was a Franciscan. Again, Grosseteste, in a letter to William de Raleger, refusing to appoint the latter's nephew—a boy not yet out of his Ovid—to a cure of souls, calls Robert Bacon to witness that he is willing to allow the lad ten marks a year out of his private purse. Here, again, we have Roger in the manuscript, but the date (1235?) clearly puts him out of court, and in Luard's edition of the bishop's letters the story is indexed to Robert. In any case Robert Bacon, the first Dominican writer in England(Wood, Annals, i. 192), can hardly fail to have been a friend of Robert Grosseteste, the great patron of the new orders; nor this last to have been acquainted with one who was, as Trivet tells us, the ruling theological power at Oxford.
The list of Robert Bacon's works, as given by Bale, includes a 'Liber in sententias Tetri Lorubardi,' 'Lectiones Ordinaræ,' 'Liber super Psalterium.' To this list Anthony à Wood adds a work called 'Syncategorement,' on the manuscript of which the words 'Roberti Baconis' are said to appear. Robert Bacon was the author of at least one life of his friend and master, Edmund Rich. Portions of this are probably worked up—with, however, an entire alteration of style—into Surins's 'Life of St. Edmund' (iv. 368, 16 Nov.); but as a separate work it has perished, together with the life of the same archbishop, which Matthew Paris tells us he drew up on the same authority.
[Leland, Bale, and Pits, under Robert and Roger Bacon and Richard Fitzacrius; Matthew Paris, iii. 244, v. 16, 369; Trivet's Annales 229; Brewer's Mon. Franc. 56; Luard's Epistolæ Grosseteste; Hardy's Cat. 87, 93, 108; Biographia Britannica; Moreri, i., under Robert Bacon. For a list of the various Bacons flourishing about the Same time see Wake's Rex Platonicus, 208-10; Wood's Annales, i. 192, &c.; and authorities cited above.]
BACON, ROGER (1214?–1294), philosopher, was born at or near Ilchester, Somersetshire, about 1214. The materials for his life consist, in the first place, of the traditional records, partly drawn from early writers on the history of his time, but to a large extent without any satisfactory foundation; and, in the second place, of the somewhat numerous references, autobiographical in character, contained in his published or unpublished writings. The more important of these writings have only in recent times become the object of study, and the task of the biographer is largely the correction of the earlier tradition by means of the indications so afforded. An interesting but incomplete summary of the older material is furnished by Anthony à Wood; a more enlightened survey by Jebb in the preface to his edition of the 'Opus Majus' (1733); the latest researches have borne good fruit in the works of Brewer and Charles (cited under). Doubtless some obscure points may yet be cleared up by more thorough study of the manuscripts than has yet been undertaken, but it is not probable that there can ever be given more than a scanty outline of the life and labours of a very eminent English thinker.
Bacon's family seems to have been in good circumstances, but to have suffered severe reverses during the stormy reign of Henry III (Op. Ined. p. 16). He speaks of one brother as wealthy, and of another as a scholar (Op. Ined. 13), but there is no means of establishing any relation between these and certain others of the same name commemorated in the history of the time. Robert Bacon, the Dominican, who lectured at Oxford, may have been an uncle of Roger, but could hardly have been his brother. There is no reason to doubt the tradition that he began his university studies at Oxford, and if the report by Matthew Paris (Hist. Maj. 1644, p. 205) of the ironical riddle proposed by him to Henry III be accepted, he must have been at Oxford and in orders in 1233. How long he remained at Oxford there is no record to determine; sufficiently long, however, to have known and appreciated some of the able teachers who then gave the university its renown—Robert Grosseteste, Adam de Marisco, Richard Fitzacre, and Edmond Rich—and to have been influenced by them in the direction of positive science, natural and linguistic. As the length of his stay at Oxford is uncertain, so the date of the next event in his life, transference to the university of Paris, cannot be definitely fixed. From his own references to his study at Paris, his first residence there must have terminated about 1250 (Charles, p. 10). Tradition has assigned to him the usual brilliant career of an eminent teacher in a mediæval university. He is said to have graduated with distinction as doctor, to have attracted students by his lecturing, and to have been known by the significant cognomen of 'doctor admirabilis' (Wood, as in Brewer, Op. Ined. pref p. lxxxvi). But the historians of the university of Paris know or say little of him, and from the way in which he himself refers to his Paris studies it may be inferred that, though he certainly gained high reputation, his withdrawal from the ordinary current of thought was so complete as to render him in no special sense a brilliant light in the scholastic firmament.
