Roger Bacon's Family Life

Source Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 02, Bacon, Roger by Robert Adamson

Bacon’s family seems to have been in good circumstances, but to have suffered severe reverses during the stormy reign of Henry III (Op. Ined. p. 16). He speaks of one brother as wealthy, and of another as a scholar (Op. Ined. 13), but there is no means of establishing any relation between these and certain others of the same name commemorated in the history of the time. Robert Bacon, the Dominican, who lectured at Oxford, may have been an uncle of Roger, but could hardly have been his brother. There is no reason to doubt the tradition that he began his university studies at Oxford, and if the report by Matthew Paris (Hist.Mag. 1644, p.205) of the ironical riddle proposed by him to Henry III be accepted, be must have been at Oxford and in orders in 1233. How long he remained at Oxford there is no record to determine; sifficiently long, however, to have known and appreciated some of the able teachers who then gave the university its renown—Robert Grosseteste, Adam de Marisco, Richard Fitzacre, and Edmond Rich—and to have been influenced by them in the direction of positive science, natural and linguistic.