Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hickes is remembered chiefly for his pioneering work in Anglo-Saxon linguistics. His celebrated Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus appeared in two volumes from 1703 to 1705. The Thesaurus surveyed the grammar of Old English, Gothic, and several other ancient northern languages.
Hickes refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary after the revolution of 1688. He was first suspended and then formally deprived of the deanery as a result.
The Bangorian Controversy was a major English church dispute of the early eighteenth century. Hickes is credited with offering the provocation that set it off, through his high-church treatises of 1707 and a posthumous publication of 1716. Bishop Hoadly responded with attacks including his famous 1717 sermon The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ.
Hickes was consecrated suffragan bishop of Thetford in 1694, after returning from a mission to James II in exile in France. The mission had been organized by William Sancroft and the other nonjurors. Their aim was to secure the continuation of episcopal succession for the non-juring church.
John Hickes (1633-1683) was the younger brother of George Hickes and a nonconformist minister. He was one of the Sedgemoor refugees sheltered by Alice Lisle after Monmouth's rising. George Hickes tried and failed to save him from death.
Hickes's first major scholarly work in linguistics was the Institutiones Grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae et Moeso-Gothicae, a grammar of Old English and Gothic published in 1689. It preceded his larger Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus by more than a decade.