LEWIS of CAERLEON (fl. 1491), mathematician, theologian, doctor of medicine, and teacher at Oxford

He has often been confused with Lewis Charlton, bishop of Hereford (died 1369). Bale, in his Scriptorum Illustrium Catalogus Cent. Sex, lists six books by him, namely, Super Magistrum Sententiarum, De Eclipsi Solis et Lunae, Tabulae Eclipsium Richardi Wallingfordi, Canones Eclipsium, Tabulae Umbrarum, and Fragmenta Astronomica. He is said to have been imprisoned for his devotion to the cause of the Lancastrians. He was certainly high in the favour of Henry VII, for the Calendar of Patent Rolls records a grant to him for life of forty marks out of the revenues of Wiltshire, 24 February 1486, and a further grant of twenty marks for life, 27 November 1486, at the receipt of the Exchequer, when he is called ' the king's servant, Lewis Caerlion, doctor of medicine.' On 3 August 1488 he received a grant for life to be one of the knights of the king's alms in the chapel or church of S. Mary the Virgin, S. George the Martyr, and S. Edward the Confessor at Windsor castle, a grant which was repeated in the same terms 14 September 1491. The King's Book of Payments of May 1510 records a reward of £100 in gold to Master Lewis, the princess of Castile's physician, but it is not certain whether this last-named Lewis is one and the same person as Lewis of Caerleon.

Author

• Walter Thomas Morgan, (1912 - 1990)

Sources

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (under Charlton, Lewis)
• Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry VII, 1485-94
• Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, Vol. II, Part II

Published date: 1959

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