Now Robert, the bishop of Bath, had died on 31 August 1166; and the Pipe Rolls for 1166-7 and the next six years, during which the bishopric remained in the king's hand, afford evidence that John Cumin was all this time in possession of the archdeaconry of Bath.[1] The entries in which his name occurs would require for their elucidation a discussion too elaborate to be attempted here. It will suffice to say that they are of two kinds: there is a payment to John Cumin of 2l., 'for his prebend, by the king's writ': that is for the year 1166-7, and there is a like payment the next year, but not afterwards: possibly it was a pension paid to him till a prebend should fall vacant. But there is, on the other hand, an annual charge of twenty shillings against John Cumin, which never gets paid, and which stands as a bad debt of 6l. in the sheriff's account at the close of the vacancy of the see. This was a payment due to the bishopric from the rents of the archdeaconry of Bath, as we learn from the Pipe Roll of 1174-5, where it still stands as unpaid. In 1176-7 the debt was pardoned to John Cumin by a writ of the king.
It would appear that, when the see of Bath was vacant, the king, who claimed the episcopal patronage, had given the archdeaconry of Bath to his faithful servant, John Cumin, in spite of the fact that already in Bishop Robert's lifetime the pope had granted it in another direction. This, then, was the 'lay appointment', which. the pope took so much amiss. But so angry a letter as the pope writes must have had something more behind it. John Cumin was marked out for the papal wrath. What the bishop of Worcester did we do not know; but Ave find John Cumin's name in an undated list of those whom Becket excommunicated.[2] And it is at least a fair conjecture that he was ' the schismatic of Bath'.
But we must go back a little to note some activities of a different kind. On 27 February 1167 the bishopric of Hereford fell vacant, and John Cumin was placed by the king in charge of the temporalities, for which he accounts until 1173. In the Pipe Rolls of 1169-70 and the two following years he holds pleas as an itinerant justice, together with Reginald de Warren, in the counties of Hants, Wilts, Somerset and Devon. The first entry under Somerset is a fine imposed on the dean of Wells, for a servant of the king whom he had imprisoned. The dean cannot have enjoyed being fined by the archdeacon of Bath. We may here observe that, although it is certain that John Cumin held the archdeaconry of Bath, in such sense at least that he could be commanded by the pope to resign it, and also that he could be debited in the Pipe Rolls with an archidiaconal due of twenty shillings a year for six years during the vacancy of the bishopric, yet we have no evidence of his ever having performed any archidiaconal function in person; and, what is still more strange for that period, there appear to be but two instances in which the actual title of archdeacon of Bath is given to him. In the Wells records his name does occur once during the tenure of the office: for he witnesses a royal licence authorising Reginald bishop of Bath to keep hounds for the chase, as his predecessors did, throughout Somerset; but the licence was granted at Clarendon, and this is not one of the two occasions
