Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Gascoigne, John
GASCOIGNE, JOHN (fl. 1381), doctor of canon law at Oxford, was possibly the ‘Jo. Gascoigne, cler.’ who is named in a seventeenth-century pedigree (Thoresby, Duc. Leod. p. 177) as brother to Sir William Gascoigne [q. v.], the chief justice, and to Richard Gascoigne of Hunslet, who is said to have been father of Thomas [q. v.], afterwards chancellor of the university of Oxford. John Gascoigne was a member of that university and became a doctor of canon law, in which capacity he was called to give evidence before a commission of five bishops, appointed 20 June 1376 to examine into certain controversies between the masters of arts and the faculty of law at Oxford (Rymer, Fœdera, vii. 112; Wood, History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, i. 488, ed. Gutch). In 1381 he appears among the signatories of the judgment of William Berton, chancellor of the university, condemning the doctrine of Wycliffe touching the sacrament (Fasc. Ziz. 113, ed. Shirley). Possibly on the strength of this, for there is no further available evidence, Pits (De Angliæ Scriptoribus, p. 540), credits him with the authorship of a book ‘Contra Wiclevum.’ There has also been assigned to him a life of St. Jerome, which is really the work of Thomas Gascoigne [q. v.], and a ‘Lectura de Officio et Potestate Delegati,’ of which a copy was once to be found in the royal library (then at Westminster), but is no longer identifiable.
[Tanner's Bibl. Brit. p. 311.]