who although, like Kilwardby, an old teacher of Cantelupe's (Reg. Peck. ccxlvii), had little of the friendliness for him which his predecessor had always displayed. At the council of Reading Peckham took up a line of policy which was offensive to his suffragan bishops (July 1279). Bishop Thomas led the resistance to the Franciscan primate. The main points of difference were expressed in twenty-one articles drawn up in 1282 by the bishops (Wilkins, Concilia, ii. 75, and Reg. Peck. cclvii). But long before this stage had been attained special causes of quarrel were developed between Peckham and Cantelupe.
A matrimonial suit started before the subdean of Hereford was carried by the losing party straight to the official of Peckham, the intermediate stage before the bishop's court being omitted. Thomas naturally objected to his rights being thus ignored; Peckham would not give way, and so fierce did the strife become that Cantelupe withdrew for a considerable period into Normandy to avoid an interdict, and prosecute an appeal to Rome. How the case ended we are not informed. Early in 1282 Thomas was again in England; but another difference had arisen with Peckham. A certain Henry of Havekly, a clerk beneficed in several dioceses, had died, and Peckham claimed jurisdiction in testamentary questions connected with his estate. This his executor Nicholas, the vicar of Ross, and Robert of Gloucester, the official of Hereford, resisted. They were accordingly excommunicated by the archbishop. Cantelupe took up his official's cause and refused to issue the excommunication on the double ground that the offenders had appealed to Rome and that the archbishop had no jurisdiction. Fierce strife ensued. On 7 Feb. a meeting at Lambeth utterly failed to produce peace. Cantelupe was excommunicated, and, either before or after the sentence was pronounced, he appealed to the pope.
Affairs were now proceeding very badly. The tedious suit with Anian of St. Asaph was still dragging on slowly at the papal curia. Peter de Langona, whom Cantelupe refused to conciliate when he became bishop by reinstating him in his old prebend, had gone in person to Rome, and was pressing his suit with extreme vindictiveness and fair success. Already in 1281 Cantelupe had directed his agents to approach the powerful men in the curia with what were practically bribes (Webb, Expenses of Bishop Swinfield, ii. xcvii. All our information about Langona's suit is due to Mr. Webb's extracts from Cantelupe's register. The life in the ‘Acta Sanctorum,’ so copious on the other suits in which Thomas had more show of justice, is quite silent on this). The heavy expense, constant worry and danger of defeat and disgrace at last drove Cantelupe to the resolution to prosecute his cases in person before the papal court. Privately, secretly as Peckham boasts (Reg. Peck. ccl), Thomas withdrew from England a second time (end of March, ib.) He reached Italy in safety, and was well received at the court of Martin IV at Orvieto; this, as he came as an excommunicate, whose right to appeal was more than doubtful, was perhaps more than he could have hoped for. He retired to Montefiascona, a few miles from Orvieto, to await the progress of his suit. But he had long been in failing health. An Italian summer easily prostrated a frame emaciated by asceticism and worn with age and anxiety. He died on 25 Aug. 1282 at Orvieto, where he was buried in the monastery of Santo Severo; his funeral sermon was pronounced by the cardinal of Præneste, afterwards Nicholas IV. His servants, led by Richard of Swinfield, brought his heart and bones back with them to England. The heart he bequeathed to his friend Edmund, earl of Cornwall, who deposited it in the monastery of Ashridge. The bones found a resting-place in the cathedral of Hereford.
Peckham attempted to refuse christian burial to Thomas's remains, and availed himself of the vacancy of the see to hold a metropolitical visitation of the diocese of Hereford. But the election of Thomas's attached friend Richard of Swinfield as his successor showed that the sentiments of crown and chapter were equally adverse to the archbishop. In 1287 the bones of Thomas were translated in the presence of the king to the noble tomb in the north transept which they still occupy (Britton, Hereford Cath. pp. 56, 57). In the same year miracles were worked at his shrine. In 1290 Bishop Swinfield urgently besought Nicholas IV to admit him into the canon of saints. Nothing came of this, and again in 1299 the efforts were renewed with similar want of success. In 1305, Edward I, urged by the chapter of Hereford and by parliament (Kal. and Invent. of Exchequer, i. 83), wrote several letters to the pope and the cardinals, asking for Cantelupe's canonisation. In 1307 Clement V appointed a commission to investigate the question. A vast mass of testimony as to Thomas's life, character, and saintliness was collected, but it was not until 17 April 1320 that John XXII added him to the list of saints. Long before this his cultus had obtained a popularity second only, among recent
