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HUGH, BISHOP OF LINCOLN

London : Edward Arnold : 1901


HUGH
BISHOP OF LINCOLN

A SHORT STORY OF ONE OF THE MAKERS OF MEDIAEVAL ENGLAND

by

CHARLES L. MARSON
Curate of Hambridge
Author of "The Psalms at Work," Etc.


                  Tua me, genitor, tua tristis imago
      Saepius occurens, haec limina tendere adegit.
      Stant sale Tyrrheno classes. Da jungere dextram
      Da, genitor; teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro.

      AEN. VI. 695.







London
Edward Arnold
37, Bedford Street, Strand
1901




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                   PAGE

      INTRODUCTION                         vii

   I. THE BOY HUGH                           1

  II. BROTHER HUGH                          12

 III. PRIOR HUGH                            26

  IV. THE BISHOP ELECT AND CONSECRATE       42

   V. THE BISHOP AT WORK                    60

  VI. IN TROUBLES                           78

 VII. AND DISPUTES                          94

VIII. THE BUILDER                          111

  IX. UNDER KING JOHN                      128

   X. HOMEWARD BOUND                       143




INTRODUCTION


In a short biography the reader must expect short statements, rather
than detailed arguments, and in a popular tale he will not look for
embattled lists of authorities. But if he can be stirred up to search
further into the matter for himself, he will find a list of authorities
ancient and modern come not unacceptable to begin upon.

The author has incurred so many debts of kindness in this work from many
friends, and from many who were before not even acquaintances, that he
must flatly declare himself bankrupt to his creditors, and rejoice if
they will but grant him even a second-class certificate. Among the major
creditors he must acknowledge his great obligations to the hospitable
Chancellor of Lincoln and Mrs. Crowfoot, to the Rev. A. Curtois, Mr.
Haig, and some others, all of whom were willing and even anxious that
the story of their saint should be told abroad, even by the halting
tongues of far-away messengers. The same kind readiness appeared at
Witham: and indeed everybody, who knew already about St. Hugh, has
seemed anxious that the knowledge of him should be spread abroad. It
has snowed books, pamphlets, articles, views, maps, and guesses; and if
much has remained unsaid or been said with incautious brusqueness,
rather than with balanced oppressiveness, the reader who carps will
always be welcome to such material as the author has by him, for
elucidating the truth. If he has been misled by a blind guide, that
guide must plead that he has consulted good oculists and worthy
spectacle-makers, and has had every good intention of steering clear of
the ditch.

Though what a man is counts for more than what he does, yet the services
of St. Hugh to England may be briefly summed up. They were (1)
Spiritual. He made for personal holiness, uncorruptness of public and
private life. He raised the sense of the dignity of spiritual work,
which was being rapidly subordinated to civic work and rule. He made
people understand that moral obligations were very binding upon all men.
(2) Political. He made for peace at home and abroad: at home by
restraining the excesses of forestars and tyrants; abroad by opposing
the constant war policy against France. (3) Constitutional. He first
encountered and checked the overgrown power of the Crown, and laid down
limits and principles which resulted in the Church policy of John's
reign and the triumph of Magna Carta. (4) Architectural. He fully
developed--even if he did not, as some assert, invent--the Early English
style. (5) Ecclesiastical. He counterbalanced St. Thomas of Canterbury,
and diverted much of that martyr's influence from an irreconcileable
Church policy to a more reasonable, if less exalted, notion of liberty.
(6) He was a patron of letters, and encouraged learning by supporting
schools, libraries, historians, poets, and commentators.

Ancient authorities for his Life are:--(1) The Magna Vita, by Chaplain
Adam (Rolls); (2) Metrical Life, Ed. Dimock, Lincoln, 1860; (3) Giraldus
Cambrensis, VII. (Rolls); (4) Hoveden's Chronicle (Rolls); (5)
Benedicti, Gesta R. Henry II. (Rolls); (6) for trifles, Matthew Paris,
I. and II. (Rolls), John de Oxenden (ditto), Ralph de Diceto (ditto),
Flores Histor. (ditto), Annales Monastici (ditto); (7) also for
collateral information, Capgrave Illustrious Henries (Rolls), William of
Newburgh, Richard of Devizes, Gervase's Archbishops of Canterbury, and
Robert de Monte, Walter de Mapes' De Nugis (Camden Soc). Of modern
authorities, (1) Canon Perry's Life (Murray, 1879) and his article in
the Dictionary of National Biography come first; (2) Vie de St. Hughues
(Montreuil, 1890); (3) Fr. Thurston's translation and adaptation of this
last (Burns and Oates, 1898); (4) St. Hugh's Day at Lincoln, A.D. 1900,
Ed. Precentor Bramley (pub. by Clifford Thomas, Lincoln, N.D.); (5)
Guides to the Cathedral, by Precentor Venables, and also by Mr.
Kendrick; (6) Archaeological matter, Archaeological Institute (1848),
Somerset Archaeolog. XXXIV., Somerset Notes and Queries, vol. IV., 1895,
Lincoln Topographical Soc., 1841-2; (7) Collateral information--_cf._
Miss Norgate's "England under Angevin Kings" (Macmillan), Robert
Grosseteste, F. E. Stevenson (ditto), Stubbs' "Opera Omnia" of course,
Diocesan History of Lincoln, Grande Chartreuse (Burns and Oates), "Court
Life under Plantagenets" (Hall), "Highways in Normandy" (Dearmer);(8)
of short studies, Mr. Froude's and an article in the _Church Quarterly_,
XXXIII., and Mrs. Charles' "Martyrs and Saints" (S.P.C.K.) are the
chief.

Of this last book it is perhaps worth saying that if any man will take
the trouble to compare it with John Brady's _Clavis Calendaria_, of
which the third edition came out in 1815, he will see how much the tone
of the public has improved, both in courtesy towards and in knowledge of
the great and good men of the Christian faith.

St. Hugh's Post-Reformation history is worth noting for the humour of
it. He is allowed in the Primer Calendar by unauthorised Marshall, 1535;
out in Crumwell and Hilsey's, 1539; out by the authorised Primer of King
and Clergy, 1545; still out in the Prayer-books of 1549 and 1552; in
again in the authorised Primer of 1553; out of the Prayer-book of 1559;
in the Latin one of 1560; still in both the Orarium and the New Calendar
of the next year, though out of the Primer 1559; in the Preces Privatas
1564, with a scornful _admonitio_ to say that "the names of saints, as
they call them, are left, not because we count them divine, or even
reckon some of them good, or, even if they were greatly good, pay them
divine honour and worship; but because they are the mark and index of
certain matters dependent upon fixed times, to be ignorant of which is
most inconvenient to our people"--to wit, fairs and so on. Since which
time St. Hugh has not been cast out of the Calendar, but is in for ever.

In the text is no mention of the poor swineherd, God rest him! His stone
original lives in Lincoln cloisters, and a reproduction stands on the
north pinnacle of the west front (whereas Hugh is on the south
pinnacle), put there because he hoarded a peck of silver pennies to help
build the House of God. He lives on in stone and in the memories of the
people, a little flouted in literature, but, if moral evidence counts,
unscathedly genuine: honourable in himself, to the saint who inspired
him, and to the men who hailed him as the bishop's mate--no mean builder
in the house not made with hands.




CHAPTER I

THE BOY HUGH


St. Hugh is exactly the kind of saint for English folk to study with
advantage. Some of us listen with difficulty to tales of heroic virgins,
who pluck out their eyes and dish them up, or to the report of antique
bishops whose claim to honour rests less upon the nobility of their
characters than upon the medicinal effect of their post-mortem humours;
but no one can fail to be struck with this brave, clean, smiling face,
which looks out upon us from a not impossible past, radiant with sense
and wit, with holiness and sanity combined, whom we can all reverence as
at once a saint of God and also one of the fine masculine Makers of
England. We cherish a good deal of romance about the age in which St.
Hugh lived. It is the age of fair Rosamond, of Crusades, of lion-hearted
King Richard, and of Robin Hood. It is more soberly an age of builders,
of reformers, of scholars, and of poets. If troubadours did not exactly
"touch guitars," at least songsters tackled verse-making and helped to
refine the table manners of barons and retainers by singing at dinner
time. The voice of law too was not silent amid arms. Our constitutional
government, already begotten, was being born and swaddled. The races
were being blended. Though England was still but a northern province of
a kingdom, whose metropolis was Rouen, yet that kingdom was becoming
rather top-heavy, and inclined to shift its centre of gravity
northwards. So from any point of view the time is interesting. It is
essentially an age of monks and of monasteries; perhaps one should say
the end of the age of monastic influence. Pope Eugenius III., the great
Suger and St. Bernard, all died when Hugh was a young man. The great
enthusiasm for founding monasteries was just beginning to ebb. Yet a
hundred and fifteen English houses were founded in Stephen's reign, and
a hundred and thirteen in the reign of Henry II., and the power of the
monastic bodies was still almost paramount in the church. It was to the
monasteries that men still looked for learning and peace, and the
monasteries were the natural harbours of refuge for valiant men of
action, who grew sick of the life of everlasting turmoil in a brutal and
anarchic world. Indeed, the very tumults and disorders of the state gave
the monasteries their hold over the best of the men of action. As the
civil life grew more quiet and ordered, the enthusiasm for the cloister
waned, and with it the standard of zeal perceptibly fell to a lower
level, not without grand protest and immense effort of holy men to keep
the divine fire from sinking.

Hugh of Avalon was born in Avalon Castle in 1140, a year in which the
great tempest of Stephen's misrule was raging. In France, Louis VII. has
already succeeded his father, Louis VI.; the Moors are in Spain, and
Arnold of Brescia is the centre of controversy. Avalon Castle lies