Stephen Langton (died 1228) served as England's Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest ecclesiastical office in the land. He played an important role in events surrounding the fabled Magna Carta, signed by the English king in 1215. Though the document specified certain rights to England's landed aristocracy, it is sometimes heralded as the first formal declaration of human rights in history.

Little is known about Langton's life outside of his writings on theological matters and his tenure as an emissary between his onetime foe, King John, and the English barons. Not even a portrait of him survives. He was thought to have hailed from Lincolnshire, in the north of England, and was likely born in the mid-1150s. His father, Henry, possessed a small manor home and some property there, where ancestors from Denmark had likely settled some 200 years earlier. Around Lincolnshire at the time of Langton's youth were several famous...