[1] Thomas Chichele's occupation does not appear but his eldest son, William, is on the earliest extant list (1383) of the Grocers' Company in London.

There is therefore no foundation in fact for the account (copied into the Dictionary of National Biography from a local historian, John Cole, Wellingborough, 1838[citation not found]) that he was picked up, as a poor ploughboy "eating his scanty meal off his mother's lap", by William of Wykeham.

[1] The first recorded appearance of Chichele himself is at New College, Oxford, as "Checheley", eighth among the undergraduate fellows, in July 1387, in the earliest extant hall-book, which contains weekly lists of those dining in Hall.

On 13 April 1396, he obtained ratification of the parsonage of St Stephen Walbrook, presented on 30 March by the abbot of Colchester, no doubt through his brother Robert, who restored the church and increased its endowment.

In 1397 he was made archdeacon of Dorset by Richard Mitford, bishop of Salisbury, but litigation was still going on about it in the papal court until 27 June 1399, when the pope extinguished the suit, imposing perpetual silence on Nicholas Bubwith, master of the rolls, his opponent.

In the first year of Henry IV Chichele was parson of Sherston, Wiltshire, and prebendary of Nantgwyly in the college of Abergwili, Wales; on 23 February 1401/2, now called doctor of laws, he was pardoned for bringing in, and allowed to use, a bull of the pope providing to him the chancellorship of Salisbury Cathedral, and canonries in the nuns' churches of Shaftesbury and Wilton in that diocese; and on 9 January 1402/3 he was archdeacon of Salisbury.

In July 1405 Chichele began a diplomatic career by a mission to the new Roman Pope Innocent VII, who was professing his desire to end the schism in the papacy by resignation, if his French rival at Avignon would do likewise.

[full citation needed] In 1406 renewed efforts were made to stop the schism, and Chichele was one of the envoys sent to the new Pope Gregory XII.

In January 1409 Chichele was named with Bishop Hallam of Salisbury and the prior of Canterbury to represent the Southern Convocation at the council, which opened on 25 March 1409, arriving on 24 April.

[7] Chichele and the other envoys were received on their return as saviours of the world; though the result was summed up by a contemporary as trischism instead of schism, and the Church as giving three husbands instead of two.

Chichele now became the subject of a leading case, the court of kings bench deciding, after arguments reheard in three successive terms, that he could not hold his previous benefices with the bishopric, and that, spite of the maxim Papa potest omnia, a papal bull could not supersede the law of the land (Year-book ii.

As, however, he had obtained a bull (20 August 1409) enabling him to appoint his successors to the vacated preferments, including his nephew William, though still an undergraduate and not in orders, to the chancellorship of Salisbury, and a prebend at Lichfield, he did not go empty away.

He was with the English force under the earl of Arundel which accompanied the duke of Burgundy to Paris in October 1411 and there defeated the Armagnacs, an exploit which revealed to England the weakness of the French.

That he was in high favour with Henry V is shown by his being sent with Richard de Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick (1382–1439) to France in July 1413 to conclude peace.

There is no contemporary authority for the charge, which seems to appear first in Redman's rhetorical history of Henry V, written in 1540 with an eye to the political situation at that time, As a matter of fact, the parliament at Leicester, in which the speeches were supposed to have been made, began on 30 April 1414 before Chichele was archbishop.

He presided at the trial of John Claydon, skinner and citizen of London, who after five years imprisonment at various times had made public abjuration before the late archbishop, Arundel, but now was found in possession of a book in English called The Lanterne of Light, which contained the heresy that the principal cause of the persecution of Christians was the illegal retention by priests of the goods of this world, and that archbishops and bishops were the special seats of Antichrist.

On 12 February 1420 proceedings were begun before him against William Taylor, priest, who had been for fourteen years excommunicated for heresy, and was now degraded and burnt for saying that prayers ought not to be addressed to saints, but only to God.

A striking contrast was exhibited in October 1424, when a Stamford friar, John Russell, who had preached that any religious potest concumbere cum muliere and not mortally sin, was sentenced only to retract his doctrine.

In 1418, while Henry V was alive, he successfully protested against Beaufort's being made a cardinal and legate a latere to supersede the legatine jurisdiction of Canterbury.

[7] This brought Chichele into collision with Martin V. The struggle between them has been represented as one of a patriotic archbishop resisting the encroachments of the papacy on the Church of England.

A ferocious letter from the pope to the papal nuncios, on 19 March 1423, denounced the proceeding as calculated to ensnare simple souls and extort from them a profane reward, thereby setting up themselves against the apostolic see and the Roman pontiff, to whom alone so great a faculty has been granted by God (Cat.

On 2 May 1422, Henry V granted for 300 marks (£200) licence to found, on three acres at Higham Ferrers, a perpetual college of eight chaplains and four clerks, of whom one was to teach grammar and the other song.