Bishop of Poictiers, and in 1181 Archbishop of Lyons; that great and semi-independent see he held until 1193, when he resigned and fell back on his minor preferments and the company of the Cistercians of Clairvaux; but to the day of his death he retained the living of Eynesford in Kent, and kept up a close correspondence with the Canterbury clergy and with the learned men of England, especially Ralph de Diceto, Dean of S. Paul's, with whom he had in his youth competed for the archdeaconry of Middlesex. The letters of John of Poictiers are among the less important contributions to the Becket literature, but they are worth reading as the composition of a man of mark, of sound learning and prudent character, and an eminent canonist. The career of John of Salisbury I shall recur to more particularly further on; he also was a son of the Church of Canterbury, and retained the closest relations with his Alma Mater as long as he lived.
Another Canterbury man was Ralph de Serris, or Ralph of Sarr in Thanet, who was Dean of Rheims from 11 76 to 1194; who was a most dutiful son of the church to which he owed his education, and no doubt a faithful agent of the monastic interest, which found at Rheims such powerful protection in the Archbishop William of Champagne and the great family to which he belonged. Of Ralph of Sarr as a literary man I only know that he wrote fairly good Latin. These three men, you will observe, although sons of the Convent of Canterbury, were not monks; they were pupils of the great school of the monastery and, as clerks of the primate, affiliated to that Church. When they received foreign promotion they had to be released by a formal document from their allegiance to the Mother Church. John of Poictiers was one of the clerks whom Archbishop Baldwin, and Hubert after him, would have made canons of that college at Lambeth which they intended to set up as a centre of ecclesiastical learning and dignity, emancipated from monastic restrictions; a scheme which, if it had succeeded, might have possibly fixed the University life of England, and its ecclesiastical centre, in London itself.
