Adam Easton
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Adam Easton (13?? - 15 September 1397) was an English Roman Catholic Cardinal, born at Easton in Norfolk.
He joined the Benedictines at Norwich moving on to the Benedictine Gloucester College, Oxford where he became one of the most outstanding students of his generation. He is known to have accompanied Simon Langham to Rome, then Montefiascone and Avignon and he held the post of socius in Langham's household. Being a man of learning and ability, he obtained a post in the Curia.
He was instrumental in the attack and subsequent condemnation of John Wycliff and supporting Catholic orthodoxy in England. He was made a Cardinal by Urban VI, probably in December, 1381. On 7 March, 1381 or 1382, he was nominated Dean of York. In 1385 he was imprisoned by Urban on a charge of conspiring with five other cardinals against the pope and was deprived of his cardinalate and deanery. The next pope, Boniface IX, restored his cardinalate 18 December, and granted him the honorary title of Cardinal Priest of St Cecilia in 1389. It has been suggested that for a time Easton returned to England, however there is no evidence for this suggestion. In fact had he done so he would almost certainly have been imprisoned by Richard II with whom he was disputing the rights to a number of benefices in England. It is true that he retained benefices in England throughout this period, including Somersham, the deanery of York and a prebend in Salisbury Cathedral, which he subsequently exchanged for the living of Heygham in Norfolk.
He wrote many works the most significant of which was a massive volume entitled the Defence of Ecclesiastical Power, supporting the position of the Catholic Church and damning Wyclif's theology as false and erroneous. This and a number of his other works still exist, as do some of the manuscripts of his library, which were shipped back to Norwich from Rome in six barrels, and he composed the Office for the Visitation of Our Lady. He effected the canonization of Birgitta of Sweden in 1391 with a structured attack on a Perugian detractor, a document in which he defended women's visionary writings.
He may have been Julian of Norwich's spiritual director, editing her Long Text Showing of Love in the same way that Birgitta of Sweden's spiritual director, Alfonso of Jaen, edited her Revelationes, and became director to Catherine of Siena, whose confessor and executor was William Flete, the Cambridge-educated Augustinian Hermit of Lecceto, and to Chiara Gambacorta. Easton's Defense of St Birgitta echoes Alfonso of Jaen's Epistola Solitarii, and William Flete's Remedies against Temptations, all of which appear in Julian's text.
He died at Rome, 15 September (according to others, 20 October) 1397.
This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.
