The Life & Work of Roger Bacon

at Oxford. Their hostility toward Pierre des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester and the king’s chief adviser—who had surrounded himself with a bodyguard of Poitevins people from the Poitou region of France and flooded England with these foreigners—led them to refuse the king's summons. While the king was debating how to deal with the stubborn barons, a Dominican preacher named Robert Bacon told him frankly that there would be no hope for lasting peace in the kingdom so long as the Bishop of Winchester and his son (or kinsman), Peter of Rievaulx, remained in power. Robert Bacon’s opinion was echoed by others, and the king was persuaded to listen patiently.

“Then a certain clerk who was present at the Court, named Roger Bacon, a man of humorous speech, said with pleasant yet pointed wit, ‘My lord king, what is the thing most hurtful and fearful to those who sail across the sea?’ ‘Those who have much experience of the waters know it,’ the king replied. ‘My lord,’ said the clerk, ‘I will tell you: stones and rocks’; intending by this to refer to Pierre des Roches.”

It has been suggested that this dialogue happened too early to involve the Roger Bacon we are concerned with here. But since he could easily have been over twenty years old at the time, that doubt seems poorly founded.

What is certain from Bacon’s own statement is...