ho consecrated
him at Lyons upon March 5, 1245. Even this did not move the King.
Richard returned to England, found the temporalities of his See
disgracefully wasted by the King, sought and obtained an interview with
Henry, but achieved nothing. For a time he lived at Tarring with a poor
priest named Simon, for in his own diocese he was a beggar and a
stranger as it were in a foreign land. In 1246, however, the Pope
having threatened excommunication, the King gave way, and Richard at
once began to reform his diocese, to discipline his priests, and to
restore the ritual of his cathedral, and indeed of all the churches in
his diocese. He lived a life of severe asceticism, and gave so much in
alms that he was always a beggar. Usurers were punished by
excommunication, and Jews were forbidden to build new synagogues. It
was he, too, who first established the custom of the Easter offering
contribution from the faithful to the Cathedral, known later as St
Richard's pence. He loved the Friars, more especially the Dominicans,
who had befriended him at Orleans, and to which Order his confessor
belonged. He ardently preached the crusade and was eagerly loyal to St
Peter. It was, indeed, as he was journeying through southern England,
urging men to take the Cross, that at Dover he fell ill and died there
during Mass in the Hospitium Dei. His body was buried in a humble
grave, we read, near the altar he had built in honour of St Edmund, his
friend, in the Cathedral of Chichester. And from the moment of his
death he was accounted a saint. Miracles were performed at his tomb,
which even Prince Edward visited, and in 1262, in the church of the
Fransicans at Viterbo, Pope Urban IV. raised him to the altar. In June
1276 St Richard's body was taken from its grave in the nave of
Chichester Cathedral, and in the presence of King Edward I. and a crowd
of bishops, was translated to a silver gilt shrine. Later, this was
removed to the tomb in the south transept.

St Richard was not only a popular hero and saint both before and after
his death, to him and his shrine is due very much that is most lovely
in the Cathedral, and it was he who really reformed the chapter there.

Chichester had always been served by a dean and chapter of secular
canons. The canons were originally, of course, resident, but the
chapter had always been poorly endowed, and as time went on residence
was actually discouraged. Perhaps then arose the canon's vicars who
repre