Excerpt from Archbishop Rotherham: Lord High Chancellor of England, and Chancellor of Cambridge University, a Sketch of His Life and EnvironmentThis little book is the work of an amateur local historian. The local historian is a peacock for vanity. If he discovers his village among the numerous manors of John of Gaunt, he considers it a duty to the nation to write the history of the dynasty of Lancaster from the meridian of that village.When engaged on the sketch of the Life of Archbishop Rotherham for the Dictionary of National Biography, it seemed to me that a fuller picture of the old prelate's life in its stormier and quieter surroundings might certainly be of interest to Sheffield and Rotherham, where he is a hero, and, possibly - to the University of Cambridge, which to this day commemorates him as one of her great benefactors, to the dioceses of York (over which he presided as primate), Lincoln and Rochester, and to members of Lincoln College Oxford, which reveres him as her Second Founder. To the nature of the stormier surroundings Lord Lytton's "Last of the Barons, " and Shakespeare's "Richard III." may testify: Rotherham cannot be represented as a maker of history, but he was in the very centre of the vortex, owing to it both his eminence and his fall. As for the quieter scenes, the fascinating books on Mediæval Cambridge might yield us a glimpse of the town of wood and thatch, at a time when the Monasteries, and not the Colleges, were the dominants of its architecture - the great courts of Trinity and St. John's, the great Church of St. Mary's, and the great Chapel at King's being as yet unbuilt.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.