events. On 26 March a grant of 500 marks a year for the support of the chancellor and his clerks was issued, with exceptional declarations of the royal favour (Rot. Pat. as above). The almost immediate transference of the seal to Ralph of Sandwich and others suggests that Thomas, though remaining chancellor, was required by his party for other business (ib. m. 16). He must, however, have fulfilled some functions of his office, as his prudence, deliberation, and incorruptible honesty in the discharge of his judicial duties are especially commended.
On 4 Aug. the death of Montfort at Evesham brought the baronial power to an end. Thomas was immediately deprived of his post as chancellor, and his return to Paris probably indicates that his position in England was unsafe. Though restored to the king's favour in 1266 (Rot. Pat. 50 H. III, m. 3 in Dugdale's Baronage, p. 732), and never apparently deprived of the archdeaconry of Stafford, which was the highest ecclesiastical preferment he had as yet attained, Thomas remained abroad for several years.
Driven from active life by the collapse of the party with whose fortunes Thomas had been so intimately connected, he henceforth devoted his whole energies to theology. He lectured at Paris on the Epistles and the Apocalypse, and not later than 1272 returned to Oxford, where early in 1273 he became a regent and therefore a teacher in the same subject. His old master and confessor, Robert Kilwardby, had now become archbishop of Canterbury, and came up specially to Oxford to pronounce the usual eulogy on the newly made doctor, whom he declared to be untainted by mortal sin (Trivet, p. 305, Eng. Hist. Soc.; Rishanger, p. 102, Rolls Ser.). A few months later Thomas abandoned his lectures at Oxford to attend the second council of Lyons (7 May to 17 July 1274), which Gregory X had convoked with the object of ending the schism between the Eastern and Western churches. As in 1245, he again became a papal chaplain. At its conclusion he apparently returned to Oxford. It is about this time or earlier that his second tenure of the chancellorship of the university must be placed (Acta Sanctorum, October, i. 549 b; his name only appears once in the list of chancellors given by Wood and Le Neve, though Wood had a suspicion that he must have been chancellor in 1267, Antiquities of Oxford, ed. Gutch, Appendix, p. 327).
The permission to hold benefices in plurality which Thomas had obtained from Innocent IV thirty years earlier had been well used. Besides his archdeaconry of Stafford (1265) with the annexed prebend of Lichfield he became precentor and canon of York, canon of London, where he lived a good deal, and rector of several rich parishes. Yet Thomas satisfied the most scrupulous precisians by his anxiety in procuring good and sufficient vicars, able to preach and of good moral character. But he was not content with this. He regularly and frequently visited all his cures, celebrated mass, preached sermons, heard confessions, and availed himself of his great wealth—his church preferment brought him in 1,000 marks a year—to exercise a liberal hospitality to all classes, to bestow lavish alms on the poor, and to build, rebuild, or repair the edifices entrusted to his care. Even when absent he regularly sent doles of corn and delicacies to the poor and sick, while his great influence enabled him to strenuously defend the rights and liberties of all his churches in a grasping and lawless age. The poor round Oxford also found in him a liberal benefactor.
Family influence had already given Thomas several benefices on the southern Welsh border, when about 1273 John le Breton, bishop of Hereford, himself an eminent lawyer, appointed him to the prebend of Preston in Hereford Cathedral, apparently in the hope of thus securing him the succession to the bishopric. Unluckily the prebend was not really vacant, as the previous bishop Peter de Aquablanca, had already nominated a Burgundian fellow-countryman named Peter de Langona to the same stall. Le Breton, who was English, had turned Langona out for some unknown reason, and by appointing such distinguished men as Robert Burnell and Thomas of Cantelupe in succession sought to make his ejection secure. Langona commenced a suit against Cantelupe at Rome, but the slow movements of the papal curia prevented this from becoming an immediate cause of anxiety. In later years it assumed a very different aspect (Webb, Household Expenses of Bishop Swinfield, Camden Soc. ii. clxxviii sq.)
On 12 May 1275 Bishop le Breton died. On 15 June the chapter presented Thomas to the living as their chosen bishop. He had been elected ‘via compromissi’ on the second day of election, despite his weeping protestation of his unworthiness. The royal assent was forthwith bestowed (20 June). On 24 June Kilwardby confirmed his old pupil's election. On 26 June his temporalities were restored, and on 8 Sept. he was consecrated by Kilwardby at Canterbury (Le Neve (Hardy), i. 460; Ann. Wig., Ann. Winton., Ann. Wav., and Wykes in Ann. Mon., iv. 467, ii. 119, ii. 384, iv. 263; Ann. Lond. in Stubbs's Chron.
