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In King John’s reign the Abbot of Canterbury was so rich and grand that the king became  jealous, and sent for the Abbot to reproach him. The Abbot claimed that he was only  spending what had been given in pious gifts to the Abbey. But the king replied that  everything in the kingdom belonged to the king. However, he promised to spare the  Abbot’s life if he could answer three questions. These were: “Where is the centre of the  world?”, “How soon can I ride round the world?” and “What do I think?”  He gave the Abbot a week to find the answers, and the Abbot was in despair for he  thought the questions unanswerable. No learned man in Oxford could help him, and he  returned to Canterbury to say farewell to his monks. On the way he met his shepherd,  who at once offered to take the Abbot’s place, for a fool could sometimes succeed where  a wise man could not. The Abbot at last gave an unwilling consent, and the shepherd, his  face hidden in a monk’s cow

STUBBE, JOHN (1543?–1591), puritan zealot, born about 1543 in Norfolk, was son of John Stubbe, a country gentleman of Buxton, Norfolk, by his wife Elizabeth. A sister was wife of Thomas Cartwright the puritan [q. v.] John matriculated at Cambridge as a pensioner of Trinity College on 12 Nov. 1555, and graduated B.A. early in 1561. Although he studied law at Lincoln's Inn, he chiefly resided in Norfolk, and made his home in the manor-house of Thelveton, which he inherited from his father, together with other estates at Buxton and elsewhere in the county. An ardent puritan of some learning and literary taste, he in 1574 seems to have published a translation of the ‘Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury’ which John Joscelyn [q. v.], Archbishop Parker's secretary, had drawn up in Latin, and incorporated in the archbishop's ‘De Antiquitate Britannicæ Ecclesiæ’ (1572). Subsequently Stubbe developed a fiery zeal against catholicism which led him into a dangerous situa

Photo : Great Gate of St. Augustine's Abbey, taken Sep 2002 abbot of the monastery of St. Peter's, Canterbury, better known as the monastery of St. Augustine. He assisted Bede in the compilation of his ‘Historia Ecclesiastica,’ and what we know concerning him is chiefly derived from the dedicatory epistle at the beginning of that ​work. Albinus was a pupil of Archbishop Theodore and his coadjutor Adrian, abbot of St. Peter's. Through the instructions of the latter he became not only versed in the scripture's, but likewise a master of Greek and Latin (Chron. G. Thorne). On the death of Adrian, Albinus succeeded to the abbacy, being the first native Englishman who filled that post. Bede in his epistle says that he was indebted to Albinus for all the facts contained in his history relating to the Kentish church between the first conversion of the English and the time at which he was writing. Much of this information was collected by the presbyter Nothelm, who,

PETO, WILLIAM (d. 1558), cardinal, whose name is variously written Petow, Peytow, and Peytoo (the last form used by himself), was a man of good family (Harpsfield, Pretended Divorce of Henry VIII, p. 202, Camden Soc.; Holinshed, Chronicle, iii. 1168, ed. 1587). De Thou and others say he was of obscure parentage, simply because his parents are unknown—a fact for which one writer likens him to Melchizedek. Holinshed and some others call his christian name Peter, apparently by a sort of confusion with his surname. He was related to the Throgmortons of Warwickshire, or at least to Michael Throgmorton, a faithful attendant of Cardinal Pole, brother of Sir George Throgmorton of Coughton. As he seems to have been very old when he died, his birth must be referred to the fifteenth century. He was confessor to the Princess Mary, Henry VIII's daughter, in her early years (Cal. State Papers, Venetian, vi. 239). At the time when he first became conspicuous he was provincial of the G