Education
Pecock was probably born in Wales and was educated at Oriel College, Oxford.
Pecock was probably born in Wales and was educated at Oriel College, Oxford.
Having been ordained priest in 1421, Pecock secured a mastership at Whittington College, London in 1431 where he was also parish priest of Saint Michael Paternoster Royal, the adjacent parish church. On 14 June 1444 he was consecrated as Bishop of Street Asaph, and translated as Bishop of Chichester on 23 March 1450. He wrote books of both a pedagogical and polemical nature.
He joined the debate on Christian doctrine in his Repressing of Over Mich Wyting the Clergie, 1449, and Book of Faith, 1456.
lieutenant was principally Pecock"s appeal to reason and his attack on the primacy of episcopal authority for which he was deprived in 1458. Owing to these views, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier, ordered his writings to be examined.
This was done and he was found guilty of heresy. Pecock was removed from the privy council and he publicly (at Street Paul"s Cross, 4 December 1457), renounced his opinions in accordance with his previously stated opinion about the need for obedience in all matters to the Church hierarchy.
Pecock, who has been called "the only great English theologian of the 15th century," was then forced to resign his bishopric in January 1459, and was removed to Thorney Abbey in Cambridgeshire, where he doubtless remained until his death about 1461.
The bishop"s chief work is the famous Represser of over-much weeting of the Clergie, which was issued c. 1449-1455. In thought and style alike it is the work of a man of learning and ability. A biography of Pecock is added to the edition of the Repressor published by Churchill Babington for the Rolls Series in 1860.
In 1454 he became a member of the privy council.