Kennett, White (1660–1728)

English churchman and author, bishop of Peterborough from 1718 until his death. He won renown for his broad range of scholarship, which include ed history, topography, and philology.

Kennett was born in Dover, and educated at Westminster School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford. As an opponent of James II's pro-Catholic ecclesiastical policy, he joined the Low Church party and openly supported the Glorious Revolution. He held church posts at Salisbury and Peterborough in the early 1700s, and was a co-founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Among his works are Parochial Antiquities, 1695, The Compleat History of England, 1706, and A Register and Chronicle, Ecclesiastical and Civil, 1728.