London. He certainly held office until 1123, and nothing but ill-health drove him ultimately from power. His great position in the west enabled him for some years to devote the whole revenue of his bishopric to carrying out the rebuilding of St. Paul's Cathedral, which the preceding bishop, Maurice, had begun on so lavish a scale as to prove a serious burden to his successor. He almost finished the great work, but after a few years he apparently grew tired of the excessive outlay, and perhaps completed it in a less magnificent way. Towards the end of his life he employed his wealth mainly in the foundation of the priory of St. Osyth, for Augustinian regular canons, on the manor of Chich (Osyth St. Chick), in Essex, belonging to the see of London. He had already advised Queen Matilda to establish the Augustinians at Holy Trinity in Aldgate, the first settlement of this popular order in England. In 1123 William of Corbeuil, first prior of St. Osyth's, was made archbishop of Canterbury, an election not improbably due to the founder's influence. But an attack of paralysis in the same year compelled Belmeis, very unwillingly—for he loved power to the last—to resign his position in Shropshire. At last he sought at St. Osyth's a refuge from the cares of active life. He died in that monastery on 16 Jan. 1127, though it is doubtful whether he had formally retired from his see. His last act was to make some restitution of lands and churches he had wrongfully taken from the abbey of Shrewsbury. He was buried where he died, and the canons celebrated their founder in his epitaph as ‘vir probus et grandævus, per totam vitam laboriosus.’
Richard of Belmeis was a type of the ministerial prelate of the twelfth century, and may be placed after Roger of Salisbury, among the ecclesiastical advisers of Henry I. Active, energetic, a good administrator and subtle intriguer, not above treachery when it served him or his master's cause, he remained faithful to Henry in a position of great difficulty and delicacy, and was proportionately trusted by that monarch. He had little of the saint about him, and took good care of his nephews' interests both in Shropshire and London. One he made dean of St. Paul's, another archdeacon of Middlesex, and both to ecclesiastical and secular nephews he secured rich lands in Shropshire. Yet the continuer of the work of Maurice, the founder of St. Osyth's, the magnificent prelate who lavished the whole revenues of his see on his great buildings, can at least escape the charge of mere self-seeking. He was only greedy of power and influence. In his contest with Thomas of York he showed his zeal for his order and province. As administrator and jurist, as ecclesiastic, church-builder, and statesman, he ranks high among the bishops of his age.
[William of Malmesbury, De Gestis Pontificum; Eadmer's Historia Novorum; Diceto; Brut y Tywysogion; Eyton's Antiquities of Shropshire (especially vol. ii. 193–201) collects in a convenient form all that is known about Bishop Richard; Dugdale's Monasticon, vi. 1, 309, gives some account of St. Osyth's; Milman's Annals of St. Paul's, a summary of Richard's building operations.]
BELMEIS or BEAUMEIS, RICHARD de (d. 4 May 1162), bishop of London, was son of the first Bishop Richard's younger brother, Walter of Belmeis. While the elder Bishop Richard made Walter's elder son, Philip, heir to his temporal estates in Shropshire, he selected his namesake as the representative of the family interest in the church. While still very young he was made prebendary of St. Paul's and archdeacon of Middlesex, though, owing to his extreme youth, the duties of the latter office were fulfilled by a deputy named Hugh, who seems to have been under a pledge to retire when Richard attained the canonical age. But on Bishop Richard's death (1128), Hugh refused to fulfil the simoniacal contract, and the new bishop, Gilbert the Universal, supported him in his action. The young Richard found a better reception in Shropshire, where a royal grant invested him with certain prebends of the collegiate church of St. Alkmund's, Shrewsbury, which his uncle had previously possessed, and which gave him a preponderating influence on that body. He did not, however, despair of pushing his way in his uncle's old diocese. Bishop Gilbert, his enemy, died in 1134, and, after a long vacancy, the chapter vehemently opposed an attempt to make a certain Anselm bishop. In 1138 they sent their brother, Prebendary Richard, to Rome to represent their case to Pope Innocent II. He won the cause of the chapter, and also persuaded the pope to appoint the bishops of Lincoln and Hereford commissioners to investigate his personal claims to the archdeaconry of Middlesex. Before long they decided in his favour. The interloper, Hugh, was expelled, and Richard's ordination as deacon by Bishop Henry of Winchester, at the request of the papal legate, marks his actual entry into possession of the archdeaconry.
The great work of Richard's life was the conversion of the estates of the secular canons of St. Alkmund to the foundation of a college of canons regular of that branch of the Augustinian order called the Arroasian. In
