St. John's College MS. clxix. No. 8, and the latter in Bodleian MS. E. 2 as well.
[Tanner's Bibl. Brit.; Coxe's Cat. MSS. in Coll. Aulisque Oxon.]
ROGER of Hereford (fl. 1178), mathematician and astrologer, seems to have been a native of Herefordshire, and is said to have been educated at Cambridge. He was a laborious student, and was held in great esteem by his contemporaries. His chief studies were natural philosophy and astrology, and he was an authority on mines and metals. The following tracts are attributed to him: 1. ‘Theorica Planetarum Rogeri Herefordensis’ (Digby MSS. in Bodl. Libr. No. 168). 2. ‘Introductorium in artem judiciariam astrorum.’ 3. ‘Liber de quatuor partibus astronomiæ judiciorum editus a magistro Rogero de Herefordia’ (Digby MSS. in Bodl. Libr. No. 149). 4. ‘De ortu et occasu signorum.’ 5. ‘Collectaneum annorum omnium planetarum.’ 6. ‘De rebus metallicis.’ In the Arundel collection in the British Museum is an astronomical table by him dated 1178, and calculated for Hereford.
[Bale's Script. Brit. Gent. iii. 13; Pits, De Illustr. Angl. Script. p. 237; Tanner's Bibl. Brit.; Brian Twyne's Ant. Acad. Oxon. Apol. ii. 218–21; Fuller's Hist. of Cambridge; Thomas Wright's Biogr. Brit. Lit. ii. 218; Hardy's Cat. of Hist. Materials, ii. 415; Mag. of Pop. Science, iv. 275; Cat. MSS. in Bodleian Library.]
ROGER (d. 1179), bishop of Worcester, was either the youngest, or the youngest but one, of the five sons of Robert, earl of Gloucester [q. v.], and his wife Mabel of Glamorgan (cf. Materials, vii. 258, and iii. 105). His father's favourite, and destined from infancy for holy orders, he shared for a while in Bristol Castle the studies of his cousin, the future Henry II (ib. vii. 258, iii. 104), who in March 1163 appointed him bishop of Worcester (Ann. Monast. i. 49). He was present as bishop-elect at the council of Clarendon in January 1164 (Materials, iv. 207, v. 72), and was consecrated by Archbishop Thomas at Canterbury on 23 Aug. (Gerv.Cant. i. 182; Ann. Monast. i. 49). At the council of Northampton in October, when Thomas asked his suffragans to advise him how he should answer the king's demand for an account of his ecclesiastical administration, Roger ‘so framed his reply as to show by negatives what was in his mind.’ ‘I will give no counsel in this matter,’ he said, ‘for if I should say that a cure of souls may be justly resigned at the king's command, my conscience would condemn me; but if I should advise resistance to the king, he would banish me. So I will neither say the one thing nor recommend the other’ (Materials, ii. 328). He was one of the three bishops whom Thomas sent to ask the king for a safe-conduct on the night before his flight (ib. iii. 69, 312). He was also one of those charged to convey to the pope the king's appeal against the archbishop. But his part in the embassy was a passive one; in the pope's presence he stood silently by while his colleagues talked (ib. iii. 70, 73; Thomas Saga, i. 283). On Candlemas Day, 1165, he was enthroned at Worcester (Ann. Monast. i. 49, iv. 381). It is doubtful whether he joined in the appeal made by the English bishops as a body, under orders from the king, against the primate's jurisdiction at midsummer 1166. Roger was soon afterwards, in company with Bartholomew of Exeter (d. 1184) [q. v.], who had protested against the appeal, denounced by the king as a ‘capital enemy of the kingdom and the commonwealth’ (Materials, vi. 65, 63); while the appellants in general were overwhelmed with reproaches by the archbishop and his partisans, Roger seems never for a moment to have forfeited the confidence and the approval of his metropolitan; and the martyr's biographers talk of him as ‘the morning star which illuminates our sad story, the brilliant gem shining amid this world's darkness’—the Abdiel who, alone of all Thomas's suffragans, not only never swerved from his obedience to his spiritual father, but even followed him into exile.
Soon after his flight Thomas summoned Roger to join him, and Roger made a fruitless application to the king for leave to go over sea, on the plea of wishing to complete his studies, ‘he being a young man’ (ib. iii. 86). Later in the year (1166) a clerk of Robert de Melun [q. v.], bishop of Hereford, came to the king in Normandy, and stated that his own bishop and ‘Dominus Rogerus’ had both been cited by the primate and intended to obey the citation, ‘unless the king would furnish help and counsel whereby they might stay at home,’ i.e. would make some arrangement which might enable them to do so without incurring the guilt of disobedience to their metropolitan. Henry ‘complained much of the lord Roger,’ and threatened that if they went they should find the going easier than the return (ib. vi. 74). This Dominus Rogerus is probably the bishop of Worcester, who certainly went over sea next year (Ann. Monast. i. 50), and without the royal license, for Thomas's friends immediately began to rejoice over him as one who had voluntarily thrown in his lot with them in their exile, and was prepared to lose
