Faritius
(d. 1117), doctor and abbot of Abingdon
Faritius (also known as Faricius) (died 1117) was an Italian Benedictine Abbot of Abingdon and physician.
Life
Faricius was born in Arezzo, Tuscany, a Benedictine monk who became known as a skilful physician and man of letters. He was in England in 1078, when he witnessed the translation of the relics of St. Aldhelm, and was cellarer of Malmesbury Abbey when, in 1100, he was elected abbot of Abingdon. He owed his election to a vision, reported to the king Henry I; Faricius was either already, or was soon afterwards, the king's physician.
He was consecrated on 1 November by Robert Bloet, bishop of Lincoln. The restoration of the conventual buildings was his first care, and he also rebuilt a large part of the church, probably the whole of the eastern end, the transepts, and the central tower, placing his new building to the south of St. Æthelwold's church He enriched the abbey by obtaining grants of land and gifts, caused books of divinity and medicine to be copied for the library, was liberal to the monks, and raised their number from twenty-eight to eighty. The payments he received for his work as a physician enabled him to do all this.
When, after the see of Canterbury had remained vacant for five years, Henry held a council at Windsor on 26 April 1114 in order to fix on a successor to Anselm, he was anxious to procure the election of Faricius.
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This entry incorporates text from “Faritius” 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.