Henry Chichele

Henry Chichele ( , also Checheley; – 12 April 1443) was Archbishop of Canterbury (1414–1443) and founded All Souls College, Oxford. Early life Chichele was born at Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire, in 1363 or 1364; Chichele told Pope Eugene IV, in 1443, in asking leave to retire from the archbishopric, that he was in his eightieth year. He was the third and youngest son of Thomas Chichele, who appears in 1368 in extant town records of Higham Ferrers, as a suitor in the mayor's court, and in 1381–1382, and again in 1384–1385, was mayor: in fact, for a dozen years he and Henry Barton, schoolmaster of Higham Ferrers grammar school, and one Richard Brabazon, filled the mayoralty in turns. 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. On 9 June 1405 Henry Chichele was admitted, in succession to his father, to a burgage in Higham Ferrers. His mother, Agnes Pincheon, is said to have been of gentle birth. 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) that he was picked up, as a poor ploughboy "eating his scanty meal off his mother's lap", by William of Wykeham. This story was unknown to Arthur Duck, Fellow of All Souls, who wrote Chichele's life in 1617. Education 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. He had come from Winchester College in one of the earliest batches of scholars from that college, the sole feeder of New College, not from St John Baptist College, Winchester, as guessed by to cover the mistaken supposition that St Mary's College, Winchester was not founded until 1393. St Mary's College was formally established in 1382, and the school had been founded in 1373.