ULLERSTON, RICHARD

Theologian, conciliarist; b. Lancashire, England; d. Chilmark, Wiltshire, England, 1423. He was fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, 1391 to 1402; chancellor's commissary, 1407–08; canon of Salisbury and prebendary of Axford from 1416; rector of Chilmark from June 1423. In 1407–08, at the request of Robert hallum, bishop of Salisbury, he drew up 16 Petitiones pro ecclesiae militantis reformatione, which were the basis of the English bishops' reform movement at the Council of pisa. They were later used as a model for the Oxford Petitions to the Council of constance, were quoted at Constance, and were used in the Reformatoria. He also wrote a treatise on knighthood, De officio militari, for Prince Henry of Monmouth, later Henry V, and the Defensorium dotacionis ecclesiae, against the attack of the lollards on Church endowments.

Bibliography: Sources. The fullest account to date, with sources, is a. b. emden, A Biographical Register of the Scholars of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500, 3 v. (Oxford 1957–59) 3:1928–29 and Bodleian Library Record 6 (1957–61) 685. Petitiones, ed. h. von der hardt, Magnum Oecumenicum Constantiense Concilium, 7 v. (Berlin 1700) 1: 1126–70, and Oxford Petitions in d. wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, 4 v. (London 1737) 3:360–365. Sermon on St. Osmund, May 1416, ed. from Ullerston's holograph by a. r. malden in The Canonization of St. Osmond (Salisbury 1901), appendix 2:236–242. Literature. e. f. jacob, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (2d ed. Manchester 1953); The Fifteenth Century 1399–1485 (Oxford 1961).

[t. p. dunning]