. Leach, _History
of Winchester College_), while no such college as St John's College at
Winchester ever existed.

Chicheley appears in the Hall-books of New College up to the year
1392/93, when he was a B.A. and was absent for ten weeks from about the
6th of December to the 6th of March, presumably for the purpose of his
ordination as a sub-deacon, which was performed by the bishop of Derry,
acting as suffragan to the bishop of London. He was then already
beneficed, receiving a royal ratification of his estate as parson of
Llanvarchell in the diocese of St Asaph on the 20th of March 1391/92
(_Cal. Pat. Rolls_). In the Hall-book, marked 1393/94, but really for
1394/95, Chicheley's name does not appear. He had then left Oxford and
gone up to London to practise as an advocate in the principal
ecclesiastical court, the court of arches. His rise was rapid. Already
on the 8th of February 1395/96 he was on a commission with several
knights and clerks to hear an appeal in a case of _John Molton, Esquire
v. John Shawe, citizen of London_, from Sir John Cheyne, kt., sitting
for the constable of England in a court of chivalry. Like other
ecclesiastical lawyers and civil servants of the day; he was paid with
ecclesiastical preferments. On the 13th of April 1396 he obtained
ratification of the parsonage of St Stephen's, Walbrook, presented on
the 30th of March by the abbot of Colchester, no doubt through his
brother Robert, who restored the church and increased its endowment. In
1397 he was made archdeacon of Dorset by Richard Mitford, bishop of
Salisbury, but litigation was still going on about it in the papal court
till the 27th of June 1399, when the pope extinguished the suit,
imposing perpetual silence on Nicholas Bubwith, master of the rolls, his
opponent. In the first year of Henry IV. Chicheley was parson of
Sherston, Wiltshire, and prebendary of Nantgwyly in the college of
Abergwilly, North Wales; on the 23rd of February 1401/2, now called
doctor of laws, he was pardoned for bringing in, and allowed to use, a
bull of the pope "providing" him to the chancellorship of Salisbury
cathedral, and canonries in the nuns' churches of Shaftesbury and Wilton
in that diocese; and on the 9th of January 1402/3 he was archdeacon of
Salisbury. This year his brother Robert was senior sheriff of London. On
the 7th of May 1404, Pope Boniface IX. provided him to a prebend at
Lincoln, notwithstanding he already held prebends at Salisbury,
Lic