Cotton Nero D. VII, f.20 Miniature shows Richard of Wallingford, Abbot of St Albans, illustration...

Richard of Wallingford (1292-1336) was a catholic monk and English mathematician who made major contributions to astronomy and horology while serving as abbot of St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire. best known for the astronomical clock he designed, while he was abbot, which is described in the Tractatus Horologii Astronomici (1327). The clock was completed about 20 years after Richard's death by William of Walsham but was apparently destroyed during Henry VIII's reformation and the dissolution of St Albans Abbey in 1539. His clock almost certainly was the most complex clock mechanism in existence at the time in the British isles, and one of the most sophisticated ones anywhere