From around 1160 to 1166, he studied in Paris, where he was a student of John of Salisbury and Gerard la Pucelle, and, at some point in his life, probably also in Poitiers.
Niger was part of Thomas Becket's entourage during the latter's exile in France in the early 1160s and played an important role in connecting the exiled archbishop with Pope Alexander III's German ally Conrad of Mainz.
Apart from several theological works, Niger wrote two chronicles in Latin, one on the German emperors and the kings of France and England, which runs up to 1206, and the other one treating history from the world's origin up to the year 1199.
In his chronicle, he remained a "violent partisan" of Becket[1] and a critic of Henry, declaring that "the king let no year pass without molesting the country with new laws".
A collection of four offices – Nativity, Annunciation, Assumption, and Purification — composed by him, both notation and text, is preserved in the library of Lincoln Cathedral (15, fols.