In the year 1244 the See of Chichester fell vacant by the death of Bishop Ralph Neville, and at the King’s suggestion the canons elected their archdeacon, a keen supporter of his.  Boniface at once held a synod, quashed the election, and recommended his chancellor Richard as Bishop, to which the chapter agreed.  The king was, of course, furious.  Richard, who was received by him, could do nothing with him, and so immediately appealed to the Pope, Innocent IV., it was, who consecrated him at Lyons upon March 5, 1245.  Even this did not move the King.  Richard returned to England, found the temporalities of his See disgracefully wasted by the King, sought and obtained an interview with Henry, but achieved nothing.  For a time he lived at Tarring with a poor priest named Simon, for in his own diocese he was a beggar and a stranger as it were in a foreign land.  In 1246, however, the Pope having threatened excommunication, the King gave way, and Richard at once began to reform his diocese, to discipline his priests, and to restore the ritual of his cathedral, and indeed of all the churches in his diocese.  He lived a life of severe asceticism, and gave so much in alms that he was always a beggar.  Usurers were punished by excommunication, and Jews were forbidden to build new synagogues.  It was he, too, who first established the custom of the Easter offering contribution from the faithful to the Cathedral, known later as St Richard’s pence.  He loved the Friars, more especially the Dominicans, who had befriended him at Orleans, and to which Order his confessor belonged.  He ardently preached the crusade and was eagerly loyal to St Peter.  It was, indeed, as he was journeying through southern England, urging men to take the Cross, that at Dover he fell ill and died there during Mass in the Hospitium Dei.  His body was buried in a humble grave, we read, near the altar he had built in honour of St Edmund, his friend, in the Cathedral of Chichester.  And from the moment of his death he was accounted a saint.  Miracles were performed at his tomb, which even Prince Edward visited, and in 1262, in the church of the Fransicans at Viterbo, Pope Urban IV. raised him to the altar.  In June 1276 St Richard’s body was taken from its grave in the nave of Chichester Cathedral, and in the presence of King Edward I. and a crowd of bishops, was translated to a silver gilt shrine.  Later, this was removed to the tomb in the south transept.

St Richard was not only a popular hero and saint both before and after his death, to him and his shrine is due very much that is most lovely in the Cathedral, and it was he who really reformed the chapter there.