clerk sacrist of Ely. Archbishop Thomas wrote to him strongly on this matter, and at last cited him to appear before him for disregard of his letters (Cotton MS. Titus A. i. folios 53, 53 b).
Meanwhile he is proved by charters to have been in constant attendance at court, and he was also present at Becket's consecration (3 June 1162), and at the great council of Clarendon (January 1164). But his chief work was at the exchequer, and it is as ‘Baro de Scaccario’ that he directs a writ to the sheriff of Gloucester (Nero, c. iii. fol. 188). He also appears as the presiding justiciar in the curia regis, Mich. 1165, at Westminster (Madox, Formulare, p. xix). In the great Becket controversy he took no active part, his sympathies being doubtless divided between the privileges of his order and the prerogatives of the crown. Struck down by paralysis, it would seem, at Easter 1166, he passed the last three years of his life in quiet retirement at Ely, where he died on 30 May 1169.
A churchman only by the force of circumstances, his heart was in his official work, and the great service he rendered was that of bridging over the era of anarchy, and restoring the exchequer system of Henry I. By training his son Richard Fitzneale [q. v.] the treasurer in the same school, he secured the continuance of the elaborate system with which his name will always be identified.
[The chief original authority for Nigel's life is the account of him in the Historia Eliensis (Anglia Sacra, i. 618–29). The best modern biography of him is contained in Dr. Liebermann's Einleitung in den Dialogus de Scaccario (1875), a work of minute detail. Subsidiary sources are Cottonian MSS. Tib. A. vi., Titus A. i., Nero C. iii.; Hermannus (in D'Achery's Guibertus); William of Malmesbury, the Chronicle of Abingdon, Sarum Documents, Henry of Huntingdon, and Annales Monastici (Rolls Ser.); Madox's Exchequer and Formulare Anglicanum; Dialogus de Scaccario (Stubbs's Select Charters); Dugdale's Monasticon; Le Neve's Fasti; Rymer's Fœdera; Jaffé's Regesta, ed. Wattenbach; John of Salisbury's letters (Giles's Patres Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ); Eyton's Court and Itinerary of Henry II; Round's Geoffrey de Mandeville, and Nigel, Bishop of Ely (Engl. Hist. Rev. viii. 515).]
NIGEL, called Wireker (fl. 1190), satirist, became a monk at Christ Church priory, Canterbury, probably some time before the murder of Becket in December 1170; for he claims personal acquaintance with the archbishop: ‘we have seen him with our eyes, our hands have touched him, we have eaten and drunk with him’ (Anglo-Latin Satir. Poets, ed. Wright, i. 155). He calls himself old in line 1 of the ‘Speculum Stultorum,’ which may be assigned to the latter part of Henry II's reign; but there is no evidence as to the exact date of his birth. He took part in the dispute between Archbishop Baldwin [q. v.] and the monks of Christ Church [see under Norreys, Roger], being one of the delegates from the convent to King Richard in November 1189, and being singled out, about the same time, for a severe rating by the archbishop (Epist. Cantuar. Rolls Ser. pp. 312, 315). In his treatise, ‘Contra Curiales et Officiales Clericos’ (circ. 1193), he describes himself as ‘Cantuariæ ecclesiæ fratrum minimus frater Nigellus, veste monachus, vita peccator, gradu presbyter’ (Anglo-Latin Satir. Poets, i. 153). In that work (p. 211) he speaks of having visited Coventry after the expulsion of the monks and the introduction of secular canons in their place (in 1191), a sight which grieved him to the heart. Leland calls him precentor of Canterbury (Collect. iii. 8, and Scriptores, i. 228); but there is no precentor named Nigel in the extant obituaries of the priory, although the entry ‘Nigellus, sacerdos et monachus,’ occurs three times, viz., 14 April, 13 Aug. and 26 Sept. (Nero C. ix. ff. 9 b, 12 b; Lambeth MS. 20, ff. 180, 209 b, 225; Arundel MS. 68, ff. 24, 38, 43).
The earliest authority for the surname Wireker is Bale (Catalogus, 1557, i. 245) who refers in the notes prepared by him for the ‘Catalogus’ now in the Bodleian (Seld. MS. supra 64, f. 134) to the collections of Nicholas Grimald [q. v.]
The first part of Vespasian D. xix. is a 13th century manuscript, which originally belonged to Christ Church priory; it contains a number of Latin poems by a writer named Nigel, who may safely be identified with the subject of the present article. The first flyleaf bears the inscription ‘Nigelli de Longo Campo,’ in a hand of about the same period as the manuscript itself. From this, and from Nigel's intimacy with William Longchamp [q. v.], bishop of Ely and chancellor of England, it may perhaps be inferred that he was a kinsman of the bishop, or that he came from the same place, viz., Longchamp in Normandy. The latter supposition derives some slight support from the fact that Nigel speaks in the ‘Contra Curiales’ of having been in Normandy (Anglo-Latin Satir. Poets, i. 203).
His best known work is the ‘Speculum Stultorum,’ a satire (in elegiac verse) on the vices and corruption of society in general, and of the religious orders in particular,
