Grosseteste, Robert

Bacon was born at Ilchester in Somerset around the year 1214 to a wealthy family who supported Henry III in the war against the Barons (a position that would later drive them to ruin). He was probably sent up to Oxford at the traditional age of ten or twelve, and there proved himself to be an exceptional student, being taught by the most learned men of the day, including Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln and the leading mathematician of the time. Perhaps while an undergraduate, Bacon became a Franciscan. 

Bartholomew was one of the first great encyclopaedists, whose work l)e Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things) was an attempt to assimilate the new learning that was coming out of Spain as a result of the work of translators such as Robert of Chester. He appears to have studied under Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, and may therefore have known Roger Bacon. 

A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1953), 1-15. 

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