John Bavant
English Roman Catholic priest
John Bavant or Bavand alias Clarke (d. 1610/1613) was an English Roman Catholic priest. He was a well-respected teacher and scholar at Oxford, and served as the rector of Solihull during the 1560s, but eventually converted to Roman Catholicism and led the rest of his long life as an active missionary and ecclesiastical administrator.
Oxford fellow
Nothing is known of John Bavant's origins, except that he came from Cheshire. He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1547, where he took his MA on 17 February 1554, amongst a very distinguished cohort that included : Lawrence Humphrey, John ab Ulmis, and James Calfhill. Here he stayed until in 1558 he was appointed one of the three first graduate scholars at the newly established St John's College in the same university. Bavant was the first Greek reader at the college, from 1558 to c. 1564, and he counted amongst his pupils Edmund Campion and Gregory Martin. In 1560, Bavant was appointed rector of Solihull, in Warwickshire. He seems to have found his situation convenient, and his non-residence at St John's was resented.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Bavant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.