Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln / A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England

Not only was he bountiful to lepers, but what with the alms asked of him and given by a hand that often outran the tongue of need, he gave away a third of all he had in this way alone. Once at Newark he met a leper and kissed him. There a most learned Canon from Paris, William de Montibus, a great master and author, an early Cruden, and the Chancellor of the Diocese, said to him, “Martin’s kiss cleansed the leper.” The bishop answered humbly, “Martin kissed the leper and cured his body, but the leper’s kiss has cured my soul.”

Of Hugh’s courage several instances are cited (but impossible now to date). He went several times unarmed against threatening bands of men who flourished naked swords. In Lincoln Church, in Holland as aforementioned, and in Northampton, he faced angry clerks and laymen, knights and men at arms, and burgesses with equal vigour, and excommunicated them. It is not unlikely that the first was in defence of the Jews, and the third when he stopped the worship of a thief at the last place. The second may have been when he placed himself among the enemies of Longchamp.

He was believed, and he believed himself, to be able to cause death to those whom he excommunicated. This was so firmly acknowledged that it saved him in many a severe pinch, and shielded him from indifference, beggary, and defeat. Many instances are given us, in which misfortune and death followed upon his censures. If any one likes to plead post hoc, non ergo propter hoc, judgment may go by default; but at any rate the stories show the life of the time most vividly, and the battle for righteousness which a good bishop had to wage.

There lived at Cokewald an oldish knight, Thomas de Saleby, whose wife Agnes was barren. William, his brother, also a knight, but of Hardredeshill, was the heir to the estate. Dame Agnes detested William and schemed to disappoint him. She gave out that she was with child. William disbelieved, consulted friends, but could find no remedy. About Easter, 1194, the lady affected to be confined. A baby, Grace by name, was smuggled into the room, and sent back to its mother to be suckled. Outwitted, William went off in distress to the bishop, who sent for Sir Thomas, in private, charged him, and tried to make him confess. But he, “fearing the scoldings of his too tongue-banging wife more than God’s justice, and being, moreover, spell-bound by her viperine hissings,” affected utter innocence. The bishop plied him vigorously, urging public opinion and his own old weak state. At last he promised that he would go home and talk with Agnes, and report the next day, and if he found these things so, would obey orders. “Do so,” said the bishop, “but know that if you bate your promise, the sentence of excommunication   will strike solemnly and fearfully all the doers and abetters of this wrong.” But Agnes’ tongue outdid the bishop’s, and Thomas sulked indoors. The bishop preached about this in public, on the Easter Monday, and said it was a sin unto death. He then knotted the cord of anathema round the daring conspirators. Satan was soon up and at Thomas. He wrenched away the soul of the unhappy knight, who had gone to bed to escape the worry, and there died a sad example to wife-ruled husbands. Agnes, however, defied them all and braved out her story; and here is the crux: the infant was legally legitimate because Thomas had acknowledged it to be such. King Richard allowed little Grace, aged four, to be betrothed to Adam, a brother of Hugh de Neville, his chief forestar. Hugh, who was always at war with child marriages, issued a special caveat in this case. But when he was away in Normandy they found a priest (a fool or bribed) to tie the knot. The priest was suspended and the rest excommunicated. In the next act the chambermaid confessed; and lastly Agnes’ nerve gave way, and she did the same. But Adam still claimed the lands, won a suit in London, although William bid five hundred marks against him, and died drunk at an inn, with his baby bride. Hugh’s comment was that “the name forestar is right and aptly given, for they will stand far from the kingdom of God.” But the little heiress was again hunted into marriage, this time by a valet of John’s, Norman of the chamber, who bought her for two hundred marks. He died, and the little girl was sold for three hundred marks to Brien de Insula, a man known to history. Grace at   the last died childless, though she seems to have been a pious wife; and Saleby came back at the last to William’s long defrauded line.

Yet another forestar also under ban found some men in his forest cutting brush-wood, handled them insolently and was cut to pieces and stuck together again with twigs and left at the cross roads.

Again a deacon, Richard de Waure, quarrelled with a knight, Reginald de Argentun, and maliciously accused him of treason. The bishop forbade the suit, but the deacon danced off to my lord of Canterbury, Hubert the Justiciar, who was the real King of England and one of the ablest men the country had to serve her. He felt it right that the suit should continue. Hugh declared that he had acted as Justiciar, not as Metropolitan, and suspended Richard, who again went off to Hubert and got the sentence relaxed, and boasted that he was free from Lincoln jurisdiction. Hugh simply added excommunication to the contumacious deacon. Again the archbishop loosed, and Hugh bound. “If a hundred times you get absolved by the lord archbishop, know that we re-excommunicate you a hundred times or more, as long as we see you so all too hardened in your mad presumption. It is evident what you care for our sentence. But it is utterly fixed and settled.” Then the deacon hesitated, but before he could make up his mind his man cracked open his head with an axe.

Then again there was a girl at Oxford, who, backed by a Herodias mother, left her husband for another love. The husband appealed to the bishop, who told her to go back. She kept repeating that she would   sooner die. Hugh tried coaxing. He took her husband’s hand and said, “Be my daughter and do what I bid you. Take your husband in the kiss of peace with God’s benison. Otherwise I will not spare you, be sure, nor your baneful advisers.” He told the husband to give her the kiss of peace. But when he advanced to do so the hussey spat in his face near the altar (of Carfax) and before many reverend fathers. With a fearful voice the bishop said, “You have eschewed the blessing and chosen the curse. Lo! the curse shall catch you.” He gave her a few days’ respite and then pronounced the curse. “She was suffocated by the enemy of mankind, and suddenly changed lawless and vanishing pleasures for unending and just tortures,” says the unhesitating scribe.

Once a Yorkshire clerk was turned out of his benefice by a knight (who was in our sense also a squire) simply that the gentleman might clap in his brother. The poor parson appealed to Courts Christian and Courts Civil, but found his enemy was much too favoured for him to effect anything. He tried Rome, but, poor Lackpenny, got what he might have expected from that distant tribunal. In his distress he turned to the chivalrous Bishop of Lincoln. Now, Hugh had no business at all to meddle with Archbishop Geoffrey Plantagenet’s diocese, but it was a case of “Who said oppression?” He banned the obtruding priest by name and all his accomplices. Some died, some went mad or blind. Thus William got his own again, for, as all who knew expected, Hugh’s anathema meant repentance or death.

These anecdotes explain much that follows, and not a little the great strain that there was between Archbishop Hubert Walter and the Bishop of Lincoln. Perhaps this strain was bound to be felt, because the policy of the former was to employ churchmen largely in political and secular affairs, the policy of the other to exclude them as much as possible. In the abstract we can hardly think that it is well that priests should rule the State or bishops manipulate the national finances. But to lay down that rule at the close of the twelfth century was to cut the spine between the brains of the State and its members. Hugh, perhaps, allowed too little for the present distress; Hubert for the distant goal. Anyhow they collided.

Hubert, in his capacity of financial viceroy, the moment Richard had come back from captivity, been re-crowned, and gone off again, sent off the visiting justices to look after various pleas of the Crown, among which was a question of defaults. These gentlemen began their milking process in September, 1194. It was discovered that an old tribute of an expensive mantel had been paid in times past by Lincoln See to the King. This pall was a matter of 100 marks (say £2,000 of our money). In the long vacancy and under Bishop Walter there had been no payment, and the royal claim was for a good many years back, there being apparently some limitations. Arrears of 1,000 marks were demanded, or a lump sum of 3,000 to have done with the tribute. Hugh thought it an unworthy and intolerable thing that our Lady’s Church and he, as its warder, should be under tribute at all,   and he was prepared to do anything to end the “slavery.” However little we can share this notion, at least it was a generous one. The demand came after the Saladin taxes, the drain for the Crusade, for the king’s ransom, and during the building of the cathedral. It came to a man who gave a third of his money in alms and who lived from hand to mouth, often borrowing on his revenues before he got them. He proposed to meet this new huge call by retiring to Witham and devoting the whole emoluments of the See to redeeming this fictitious mantel. But the clergy, who knew by experience both order and chaos, rose in arms, and monastic advisers added their dissuading voices. Well might the clergy support their bishop. They had in times past paid for the king’s mantel with episcopal trimmings, and other prelates had not scorned a little cabbage over this rich tailoring. Richard cynically expected that Hugh would do the same, but his clergy knew him better. They offered to find the money. But Hugh, though he allowed them to do so, would not allow one fruitful vein to be worked. He absolutely forbade penance fines, lest, for money’s sake, the innocent should be oppressed and the guilty be given less pains than were needed. Some folk told the bishop that rascals had more feeling in their purses than in their banned souls or banged bodies. He replied that this was because their spiritual fathers laid on too lightly upon the sinners. “But,” they pleaded, “Thomas the Martyr, of most blessed memory, fined sinners.” Hugh answered, “Believe me, it was not on that head that he was a saint. Quite other virtue merits marked him a   saint; by quite another story he won the meed of martyr palm.”

Hubert must have felt it more of a financial than a moral victory when the 3,000 marks clinked in the treasurer’s box.

The next battle between these two doughty men (or shall we say systems of thought?) was fought about Eynsham Abbey. Old Abbot Geoffrey died, and at his election the Abbey had been under the See of Lincoln; but since then King Henry had claimed the gift of abbacies, a claim his son was not likely to bate. A suit with the Crown, Hugh’s friends argued, was hopeless or not worth the trouble; but this argument seemed sacrilegious to the intrepid bishop. What? Allow God and the Queen of Heaven to be robbed? Who ever agreed to let Lincoln be so pilled? He is but a useless and craven ruler who does not enlarge instead of lessen the dignities and liberties of the Holy Church. He went stoutly to the contest, crossed and recrossed the sea, and at last persuaded a sort of grand jury of twenty-four clerks and laymen that he was the patron. In a year’s time he won his case and saw Robert of Dore, a good abbot, well in his chair. Hugh spent a week with his almost bereft family, gave the new man a fine chased silver and ivory crook and a great glorious goblet, and amplified the place with a generous hand.

This was a legal triumph for the bishop, but surely it was a moral triumph for the Curia Regis to do ample justice to a strong opponent of the Crown? Of course, nobody wanted another St. Thomas episode again, least of all enacted against a man   who carried the Church of England with him, as St. Thomas, living, never did; but Hugh had small favour with the king at this time. By these successive battles the Bishop of Lincoln had come to be looked upon as the leader of the Church and the champion of her liberties. To us those “liberties” seem a strange claim, beyond our faith and our ken, too. It seems obvious to us that men, whether clerks or laymen, who eat, drink, wear, build, and possess on the temporal plane, should requite those who safeguard them in these things with tribute, honour, and obedience; and freedom from State control in things temporal seems like freedom to eat buns without paying the baker. Free bilking, free burgling, and so on, sound no less contradictory. But the best minds of England seven centuries ago dreamed of another citizenship and a higher, of which the Church was the city—a city not future only and invisible, but manifest in their midst, which they loved with passion and were jealous over, too exclusively perhaps, but in the event not unwisely. It is less difficult for us to see that any cause which would set the unselfish and lofty-minded men of that time against the preponderating power of the Crown made for the welfare and peace of the country in the future. The anarchy of Stephen’s reign, Henry’s mastery, and Richard’s might, with Hubert Walter’s genius, resulted in a dangerous accumulation of power that did actually prove almost disastrous to the State. Consequently Bishop Hugh’s greatest contest with the Crown demands the sympathy both of men who still dream of the spiritual city in (but unsoiled by) hands of mortals, and also of those who   value constitutional liberties in modern politics. The war with France kept Richard active abroad. The flow of money from England was too thin to enable him to strike the final blow he wished to strike. Hubert Walter’s power was so hampered he could do little beyond scutages, but in December, 1197, he called together a Council at Oxford. He told this universal assembly of the barons of all England that the king was in straits. He was outclassed and outmanned and like to be even dispossessed by a most powerful and determined enemy. He asked their deliberations as to help for the king in his difficulties. Oxford was the king’s birthplace and was also in Lincoln diocese.9 The Court party, who advocated abject submission to the king’s becks, at once proposed that the barons of England, among whom were the bishops, should furnish three hundred knights to the king, which knights should serve for a year without furlough. The Bishop of Lincoln’s consent was asked, and he made no reply at first, but turned it over in his mind. The archbishop, of course, spoke for the motion. Richard FitzNigel, Bishop of London, a man of finance, purchase, and political sagacity, one of the historians of the time, assured them that he and his would try every fetch to relieve the royal need. This brought up Hugh in an instant. “You, wise and noble gentlemen here before me, know that I am a stranger in this country of yours and was raised to a bishop’s office from a simple hermit life. So when the Church of my Lady Mary the Holy Mother of God was handed   over to my inexperience to rule I applied myself to explore its customs, dignities, dues, and burdens. For near thirteen years, up till now, I have not trod out of the straight tracks of my forerunners. I know the Lincoln Church is bound to furnish military service for the King, but only in this country. Beyond the bounds of England none such is due from her. Hence I think it would be wiser for me to foot it back to my native soil and till the wilderness in my wonted way, rather than bear a bishopric here, lose the ancient immunities of the Church entrusted to me, and subject her to unprecedented vexations.” This answer the archbishop took very ill. His voice choked, his lips quivered. He took up the tale, however, without comment, and asked Herbert le Poor, Bishop of Salisbury, the very man who, as Archdeacon of Canterbury, had been snubbed for simony at Hugh’s installation, and who might be expected to render a public nothing now for his then empty hand. But he had learnt something since that day, and he replied curtly that he could give no other answer than that of my lord of Lincoln, unless it were to the enormous prejudice of his Church. Then the archbishop blazed into fury. He loosed many a bitter shaft against Bishop Hugh. He broke up the assembly and told the king who it was had made the whole matter to miscarry. Two and even three postmen were sent off to lash the Lion into frenzy, and Richard ordered all that the bishop had to be confiscated as soon as possible. Herbert, the seconder, had the same sentence, and was soon Poor in estate as well as name, and only got peace   and possession back after injuries, losses, vexings, and many insults. But no man laid a finger even upon the most trumpery temporal of the Bishop of Lincoln. His anathema meant death. For nine months Richard hounded his minions on, but they dared not bite. Instead they beseeched the bishop’s pity for their unhappy position, and he resolved to seek the king and talk him over. He had no friend at Court to prepare his way. Fine old William Earl Marshall and the Earl of Albemarle tried to stop him or to make some way for him; but he did not allow them to sacrifice themselves, but sent word to the king that he was coming. Two things had happened since that December. Innocent III. had become Pope—the Augustus of the papal empire, and he was already acting most vigorously and unhesitatingly. Secondly, Hubert Walter had resigned, because the Pope took Lincoln views of bishops being judges, councillors, treasurers, and the like. These things made Hugh’s chances more favourable. Richard’s wrath, too, was a straw fire, and it had time to cool, and cooled quicklier because it had shocked his English subjects. Moreover, though highly abominable as he considered the Bishop’s checkmate, he had got the cash after all by breaking the great seal and having a new one made, which necessitated a new sealing of all old parchments, and royal wax is dear to this day. It would, therefore, not be amiss to smooth those English who were smarting at the broken seal and broken faith. Hugh’s chances, then, were not quite desperate, although he had been able to stop the mouth of the Lion for nine whole months by his   intrepidity, fame, and the help of heaven. The rest of the story, which is given minutely, gives one a little window into the times hard to equal for its clearness.

CHAPTER VI

IN TROUBLES—

The king had before this time noticed a spot of immense military importance on the Seine between Rouen and Paris, the rock of Andelys. Indeed he had once tossed three Frenchmen from the rock. It was, or might be, the key to Normandy on the French side, and he feared lest Philip should seize upon it and use it against him. Consequently he pounced upon it, and began to fortify it at lavish expense. Archbishop Walter of Rouen, and late of Lincoln, in whose ecclesiastical patrimony it lay, was furious, and obtained an Interdict, and Philip was chafed too.10 The former was appeased by the gift of Dieppe, and the latter left to digest his spleen as best he might. The work was just about finished in May when a shower of red rain fell, to the horror of all except the dauntless king, who “would have cursed an angel” who had told him to desist from this his great delight. Here it was that the king lay waiting for the truce with France to expire.

The bishop arrived at the Rock castle in the morning of St. Augustine’s day (Aug. 28th). The king was in the chapel hearing Mass, and thither the bishop followed him, and straightway saluted him. Now the king was in the royal daïs, near the outer door. Two bishops were standing just below him. (We must think of something like a small upstair college chapel for the theatre of this tale.) These two were old Hugh Pudsey, Bishop of Durham, and young Eustace, Bishop of Ely: the former a generous, loose-handed, loose-living old gentleman, the latter Longchamp’s successor, a great scholar and revenue officer. Hugh looked past the shoulders of these two and saluted again. The king glared at him for a few seconds and then turned his face. The unabashed bishop put his face nearer: “Give me the kiss, lord king.” The king turned his face further away, and drew his head back. Then the bishop clutched the king’s clothes at the chest, vigorously shook them, and said again, “You owe me the kiss, for I have come a long way to you.” The king, seemingly not astonished in the least, said, “You have not deserved my kiss.” The strong hand shook him still harder, and across the cape which he still held taut, the bold suppliant answered confidently, “Oh yes, I have deserved it. Kiss me.” The king, taken aback by this audacious importunity, smiled and kissed him. Two archbishops (Walter of Rouen most likely being one) and five other bishops were between the royal seat and the altar. They moved to make room for their uncourtly brother. But he passed through their ranks and went right up to the horn of the altar, fixed his looks firmly on the ground,   and gave his whole attention to the celebration of the Divine mysteries. The king could hardly take his eyes off the bishop all through the service. So they continued until the threefold invocation of the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. Then the celebrant, the king’s chaplain, gave the kiss of peace to a certain foreign archbishop, whose business it was, by court custom, to bring it to the king. Richard came from his place right up to the altar steps to meet him, received “the sign of the peace which we get from the sacrifice of the Heavenly Lamb,” and then with humble reverence yielded the same to the Bishop of Lincoln by the kiss of his mouth. This respectful service, which the other archbishop was making ready to receive, as the custom was, and to pass on himself, was thus given direct to the holy man. The king stept quickly up to him, when Hugh was expecting nothing of the sort, but was wrapt in prayer.11

When the Mass was over, Hugh went to the king and spoke a few strong words of remonstrance against his unjustifiable anger, and explained his own innocence. The king could answer nothing to the purpose, but said that the Archbishop had often written suspicious suggestions against him. The bishop soon showed that these were groundless, and added, “God’s honour apart, and the salvation of your soul and mine, I have never opposed your interests even in the least degree.” The king immediately asked him to come next day to the recently constructed castle of Château Gaillard, and   ordered the bishop to be given a big Seine pike, knowing that he would not eat meat. But before they left the chapel Hugh gripped him by the hand and led him from his high seat to a place near the altar. There he set him down and sat beside him. “You are our parishioner, lord king” (he was born in Oxford), “and we must answer at the tremendous judgment of the Lord of all for your soul, which He redeemed with His own blood. So I wish you to tell me how stands it with your soul in its inner state? so that I may be able to give it some effectual counsel and help, as the Divine breathing shall direct. A whole year has gone by since I last spoke with you.”

The king answered that his conscience was clear, nearly in everything, except that he was troubled by hatred against the enemies whom he was apt to find doing him wrong, and wickedly attacking him. The reply was, “If in all things you please the grace of the Ruler of all, He will easily appease your enemies or give them into your hand. But you must beware with all your might, that you are not living against the laws of your Maker in any way (and God forbid you should) or even doing any wrong to your neighbours. The Scripture says that ‘When a man’s ways please the Lord, He maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.’ On the other hand it says of others, ‘The world shall fight with him, against the unwise,’ and again the holy man saith of the Lord, ‘Who hath hardened himself against Him and hath prospered?’

“Now there is a public report of you, and I grieve to say it, that you neither keep faithful to the   marriage bed of your own wife, nor do you guard untouched the privileges of churches, especially in providing and choosing their rulers. Yes, it is said, and a huge piece of villainy it is, that moved by money or favour, you are used to promote some to the rule of souls. If this is true, then without any doubt, peace cannot be granted to you by God.” When he had given this careful and timely admonition and instruction, the king excused himself on some points, on others asked earnestly for the bishop’s intercession, and was sent off with a blessing. The bishop then went in gladness to his pike. Richard’s opinion was that “if all the other bishops were like him, no king or prince would dare to rear his neck against them.” Such salutary treatment now-a-days is the sole perquisite of the very poor. The higher up men get on the social scale, the less they need such honest dealing, it now appears.