Eborius or Eburius (

fl. ''Floruit'' (; abbreviated fl. or occasionally flor.; from Latin for "they flourished") denotes a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active. In English, the unabbreviated word may also be used as a noun indicatin ...

314) is the first

bishop of Eboracum The archbishop of York is a senior bishop in the Church of England, second only to the archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop is the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of York and the metropolitan bishop of the province of York, which covers the ...

(the later York) known by name.

Biography

Eborius is only mentioned as one of the three bishops from Roman Britain attending the Council of Arles in 314. That council was convoked by

Constantine the Great Constantine I ( , ; la, Flavius Valerius Constantinus, ; ; 27 February 22 May 337), also known as Constantine the Great, was Roman emperor from AD 306 to 337, the first one to Constantine the Great and Christianity, convert to Christiani ...

with the special object of settling the question of the Bishopric of Carthage, disputed between Cyprian and Donatus. Among the bishops from ‘the Gauls’ present at the council was ‘Eborius episcopus de civitate Eboracensi, provincia Britanniæ.’ Although suspicious, the similarity between the names ''Eborius'' and ''Eboracum'' can be explained if the bishop's actual name was

Ivor Ivor is an English masculine given name derived either directly from the Norse ''Ívarr'', or from Welsh (which spells it ''Ifor''), Irish (sometimes ''Ibar''), or Scottish, all of which likely derive it also from the original Norse form.The Oxford ...

, a common Welsh name which can easily be Latinised into ''Eborius''. The other two British bishops at Arles were ‘ Restitutus, episcopus de civitate Londinensi’ ( London) and ‘

Adelfius Adelfius () was a Romano-British bishop, possibly from Londinium (London), Lindum (Lincoln), Camulodunum (Colchester) or Legionensium (Caerleon), who was part of the British delegation who attended the church council held at Arles, in Gaul, in ...

episcopus de civitate colonia Londinensium.’ The latter name has variously been read as '' Lindum'' ( Lincoln) or '' Camulodunum'' ( Colchester). A presbyter and a deacon, ‘Sacerdos presbyter’ and ‘Arminius diaconus,’ also attended the council with Adelfius, which suggests, according to W.H.C. Frend, that he held seniority among the three bishops. Jeremy Knight states that the bishops all represented different provinces of Roman Britain, and thus the priest and deacon may have been at Arles to represent

Britannia Prima Britannia Prima or Britannia I (Latin for "First Roman Britain, Britain") was one of the Roman province, provinces of the Diocese of Britain, Diocese of "the Roman Britain, Britains" created during the Diocletian Reforms at the end of the 3rd cen ...

. The mention of these names is the most definite piece of evidence of the existence of an organised Christian church in the Roman province of Britain, and of its close dependence on the church of Gaul. It is worth noting that among the canons they subscribed was one fixing a single day for the celebration of Easter throughout the world. So that the different custom of the British church on that question had not yet arisen. The above facts are in Labbe's ‘Concilia’ from a Corvey MS., and Isidorus Mercator's list substantially agrees in including ‘Eburius,’ though it describes him only as ‘ex provincia Britanniæ’. The passage is wrongly punctuated in Migne's edition; but in Crabbe the reading is ‘ex provincia Bizacena, civitate Tubernicensi, Eburius episcopus.’ Tillemont conjecturally identifies Eborius with the Hibernius who joins in a synodal letter to Pope Sylvester I, but this seems quite arbitrary.

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Eborius 3rd-century births 4th-century deaths 4th-century Romano-British bishops People from York Bishops of York

Biography

See also

References