“ emirs,” of whom the greatest was George of Antioch, formerly in the service of the Moslem prince of El Mehdia. Mainly by him a series of conquests were made on the African coast (1135–53) which reached from Tripoli to Cape Bona. The second crusade (1147–48) gave Roger an opportunity to revive Robert Guiscard's designs on the Greek Empire. George was sent to Corinth at the end of 1147 and dispatched an army inland which plundered Thebes. In June 1149 the admiral appeared before Constantinople and defied the Basileus by firing arrows against the palace windows. The attack on the empire had, however, no abiding results. The king died at Palermo on the 26th of February 1154, and was succeeded by his fourth son William.
Personally Roger was of tall and powerful body, with long fair hair and full beard. “ He had," says Romnald of Salerno, “ a lion face, and spoke with a harsh voice.” With little or none of Robert Guiscard's personal valour, and living at intervals the life of an eastern Sultan, he yet showed to the full his uncle's audacity, diplomatic skill and determination. It is Roger II.'s distinction to have united all the Norman conquests into one kingdom and to have subjected them to a government scientific, personal and centralized. The principles of this are found in the Assizes of the kingdom of Sicily, promulgated at Ariano in 1140, which enforced an almost absolute royal power. At Palermo Roger drew round him distinguished men of various races, such as the famous Arab geographer Idrisi and the historian Nilus Doxopatrius. The king's active and curious mind welcomed the learned; he maintained a complete toleration for the several creeds, races and languages of his realm; he was served by men of nationality so dissimilar as the Englishman Thomas Brun, a kaid of the Curia, and, in the fleet, by the renegade Moslem Christodoulos, and the Antiochene George, whom he made in 1132 “ amiratus amiratorum," in effect prime vizier. The Capella Palatina, at Palermo, the most wonderful of Roger's churches, with Norman doors, Saracenic arches, Byzantine dome, and roof adorned with Arabic scripts, is perhaps the most striking product of the brilliant and mixed civilization over which the grandson of the Norman Trancred ruled.
Contemporary authors are: Falco of Benevento, Alexander of Telese, Romuald of Salerno and Hugo Falcandus, all in the Scriltori e cfonisti napoletani, ed. Del Re, vol. i. See also E. Caspar, Roger II. und die Gründnng der normannisch-sicilischen Monarchie (Innsbruck, 1904). (E. Cu.)
ROGER (d. 1139), bishop of Salisbury, was originally priest of a small chapel near Caen. The future King Henry I., who happened to hear mass there one day, was impressed by the speed with which Roger read the service, and enrolled him in his own service. Roger, though uneducated, showed great talent for business, and Henry, on coming to the throne, almost immediately made him chancellor (1101). Soon after Roger received the bishopric of Salisbury. In the Investitures controversy he skilfully managed to keep the favour of both the king and Anselm. Roger devoted himself to administrative business, and remodelled it completely. He created the exchequer system, which was managed by him and his family for more than a century, and he used his position to heap up power and riches. He became the first man in England after the king, and was in office, if not in title, justiciar. He ruled England while Henry was in Normandy, and succeeded in obtaining the see of Canterbury for his nominee, William of Corbeil. Duke Robert seems to have been put into his custody after Tinchebrai. Though Roger had sworn allegiance to Matilda, he disliked the Angevin connexion, and went over to Stephen, carrying with him the royal treasure and administrative system (1135). Stephen placed great reliance on him, on his nephews, the bishops of Ely and Lincoln, and on his son Roger, who was treasurer. The king declared that if Roger demanded half of the kingdom he should have it, but chafed against the overwhelming influence of the official clique whom Roger represented. Roger himself had built at Devizes the most splendid castle in Christendom. He and his nephews seem to have secured a number of castles outside their own dioceses, and the old bishop behaved as if he were an equal of the king. At a council held in June 1139, Stephen found a pretext for demanding a surrender of their castles, and on their refusal they were arrested. After a short struggle all Roger's great castles were sequestrated. But Henry of Winchester demanded the restoration of the bishop. The king was considered to have committed an almost unpardonable crime in offering violence to members of the church, in defiance of the scriptural command, “ Touch not mine anointed.” Stephen took up a defiant attitude, and the question remained unsettled. This quarrel with the church, which immediately preceded the landing of the empress, had a serious effect on Stephen's fortunes. The moment that the fortune of war declared against him, the clergy acknowledged Matilda. Bishop Roger, however, did not live to see himself avenged. He died at Salisbury in December 1139. He was a great bureaucrat, and a builder whose taste was in advance of his age. But his contemporaries were probably justified in regarding him as the type of the bishop immersed' in worldly affairs, ambitious, avaricious, unfettered by any high standard of personal morality.
Roger's nephew Alexander (d. 1148), who became bishop of Lincoln in 1123, was a typical secular ecclesiastic of the middle ages, wealthy, proud, ambitious and ostentatious. He founded monasteries, built castles at Newark, Sleaford and Banbury, and restored his cathedral at Lincoln after the fire of 1145. He followed the policy of Roger, whose imprisonment he shared, and died after a visit to Pope Eugenius III. at Auxerre, early in 1148.
See Sir J. Ramsay's Foundations of England, vol. ii., and J. H. Round's Geoffrey de Mandeville.
ROGER (d. 1181), archbishop of York, known as Roger of Pont l'Evéque, was a member of the household of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, where he quarrelled violently with another future archbishop, Thomas Becket. In 1148 he was appointed archdeacon of Canterbury, and soon afterwards chaplain to King Stephen, who sent him on an errand to Rome in 1152; then in October 1154 he was consecrated archbishop of York in Westminster Abbey. When Henry II. entered upon his great struggle with Becket over the immunity of clerks from secular jurisdiction, he managed to secure the support of
Roger, and having been appointed papal legate in England, the archbishop visited Pope Alexander III. and the French king, Louis VII., in his master's interests. In June 1170 he crowned the king's son Henry, in spite of prohibitions from the pope and from Becket, and for this act he was suspended. One authority declares that Roger, who was then with Henry II. in Normandy, instigated the murder of the rival archbishop,
but he swore he was innocent of this crime. He quarrelled
with Richard, the new archbishop of Canterbury, about the
respective rights of the two archiepiscopal sees, until 1176,
when the king arranged a truce between them; and he was
constantly endeavouring to assert his supremacy over the
Scottish church. The archbishop died at York on the 21st
of November 1181. He was always loyal to Henry II., to
whom he was very useful during the great rising of 1174; but
he has been accused of avarice, and he was certainly not lacking
in ambition.
Another English prelate of this name was ROGER, bishop of Worcester, a younger son of Robert, earl of Gloucester, and thus a grandson of the English king Henry I. In 1163 his cousin Henry II. appointed him bishop of Worcester, but almost, alone of the English bishops he supported Thomas Becket and not the king during the quarrel between them in 1166. In 1167 he left England to share Becket's exile, but he soon returned to court, although he appears to have remained on friendly terms with the archbishop. He died at Tours in 1179.
ROGER OF HOVEDEN, or Howden (fl. 1174-1201), English chronicler, was, to judge from his name and the internal evidence of his work, a native of Howden in the East Riding of Yorkshire. But nothing is known of him before the year 1174. He was then in attendance upon Henry II., by whom
