LINGARD, JOHN (1771-1851), English historian, was born on Feb. 5, 1771 at Winchester. Educated at the English college at Douai, where he spent some time as tutor in the family of Lord Stourton, in Oct. 1794 he settled along with seven other former members of the old Douai college at Crook hall near Dur ham, where on the completion of his theological course he be came vice-president of the reorganized seminary. In 1795 he was ordained priest, and soon afterwards undertook the charge of the chairs of natural and moral philosophy. In 1808 he accom panied the community of Crook hall to the new college at Ushaw, Durham, but in 1811, after declining the presidency of the college at Maynooth, he withdrew to the secluded mission at Hornby in Lancashire, where for the rest of his life he devoted himself to literary pursuits. In 1817 he visited Rome, where he made researches in the Vatican Library. In 1821 Pope Pius VII.
created him doctor of divinity and of canon and civil law; and in 1825 Leo XII. is said to have made him cardinal in petto. He died at Hornby on July 17, 1851.
Lingard wrote The Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church (1806), of which a third and greatly enlarged edition appeared in 1845 under the title The History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church; containing an account of its origin, government, doctrines, worship, revenues, and clerical and monastic institutions; but the work with which his name is chiefly associated is A History of England, from the first invasion by the Romans to the Commencement of the reign of William III. (8 vols., 1819-30).
See the notice by Tierney prefixed to vol. x. of the 6th ed. of the History ; and M. Haile and E. Binney, Life and Letters of John Lingard