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

  CHAPTER VII
—AND DISPUTES

When Hugh, under this new cloud, did at last reach London the archbishop had no counsel to give, except that he should shear his clergy rather tight and send their golden fleeces to appease the king. “Do not you know that the king thirsts for money as a dropsical man does for water, my lord bishop?” To this the answer was, “Yes. He is a dropsical man, but I will not be water for him to swallow.” It was plain that the archbishop was no friend in need, and back they went towards Lincoln. At Cheshunt he found a poor, mad sailor triced up in a doorway by hands and feet. Hugh ran to him, made the holy sign, and then with outstretched right hand began the Gospel, low and quick, “In the beginning was the Word.” The rabid patient cowered, like a frightened hound; but when the words “full of grace and truth” were reached, he put out his tongue derisively. Hugh, not to be beaten, consecrated holy water, sprinkled him, and bade folk put some in his mouth. Then he went on his way; and the mad man, no longer mad,   sanely went on pilgrimage, men said, and made a fine end at the last. His own bishop, who had met him, had clapped spurs to his horse and bolted. It may be suspected that this bolting bishop was the newly elect of London, who was William de Santa Maria, an ex-Canon of Lincoln, Richard’s secretary, Giraldus’ opponent, better known than loved in his late Chapter.

Matters being settled at Lincoln, he set out again for London and paused to ask the Barons of the Exchequer most kindly to see to the indemnities of his church while he was away. They rose to greet him and readily gave their promises. They prayed him to take a seat among them even for a moment. So pleased were they to have the archfoe of clerical secularism in this trap, that they called it a triumph indeed, to see the day when he sat on the Treasury bench. He jumped up, a little ashamed, kissed them all, and said, “Now I, too, can triumph over you if after taking the kiss you allow in anything less than friendly to my church.” They laughingly said, “How wonderfully wise this man is! Why, he has easily laid it upon us, that whatever the king orders, we cannot without great disgrace trouble him at all.” He blessed them all and was soon in Normandy. But Richard was following hot-foot the two half-brother Ademars, lords of Limoges and Angoulême, who had been playing into the hands of the French enemy. There was nothing to do but wait patiently, which he did at St. Nicholas’ Monastery, Angers, from February to the beginning of March, 1199. Pope Innocent III.’s legates were also there, and they passed three weeks   together. He conferred ordinations near here in the Abbey of Grandmont; refusing to ordain one of Walter Map’s young friends, who afterwards became a leper. The king, it was reported, was full of huge threats and savage designs against his despisers, and if the clergy trembled before, they now shook like aspen leaves. The story of Hugh’s predicament had got wind. The Hereford Canons wanted to choose the witty Walter Map to be bishop. He was already Archdeacon of Oxford, Canon of Lincoln, and Prebend of Hereford, but alas! he was also a friend of the disfavoured bishop. This fact is worth some emphasis, as it illustrates the large-mindedness of the saint. Walter was not only a vigorous pluralist, much stained by non-residence, but he was a whipster, whose lash was constantly flicking the monks, then in their decline. If any one considers his description of the Cistercians; of the desert life wherein they love their neighbour by expelling him; of their oppression whereby they glory not in Christ’s Cross but in crucifying others; of their narrowness who call themselves Hebrews and all others Egyptians; of their sheep’s clothing and inward ravening; of their reversals of Gospel maxims and their novelties; he will see that the lash for Cistercians must have fallen a good deal also upon Carthusian shoulders. Then Master Walter was towards being a favourer of Abelard and of his disciple Arnald of Brescia, whose ascetic mind was shocked at the fatal opulence of cardinals. Altogether Walter was a man who feared God, no doubt, but hardly showed it in the large jests which he made, which to our ears often   sound rather too large. But Hugh recognised in the satirist a power for righteousness, and certainly loved and favoured him. Consequently the Hereford Canons with those of Angers and of the Lincoln Chapter laid their heads together to compose the strife between king and bishop: and the readiest way was of course for the latter to compound with a round sum and get off home.

The wars made the whole country dangerous for travelling, and it was neither safe to stay at home nor to move afield. But Job was not more persistent against his three friends than Hugh against the three unanimous Chapters, and his main argument was that the peace of the church must never be bought with money or this would endow its disturbers. His wisdom was well evidenced by events in the next reign. With this advice he urged them to sleep over the matter and discuss it next day. But the struggle to avoid compromising principles in order not only to serve the hour, but to save the love and, perhaps, the lives of friends was a very severe strain to him. When they had gone out he was dismally cast down and acknowledged that he had rarely compressed so much grief into so little space. Then he sat in silence, thought, and prayer that the tangle might be so unknotted, that God not be offended nor his own friends and sons slighted and alienated. Upon this he slept and dreamed sweet dreams of lovely sights and heard the roll of the Psalm of Divine Battle chaunted by heavenly voices, “O God, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places, even the God of Israel; He will give strength and power unto His people; blessed be   God.”15 He woke up refreshed, and at his weekly Saturday Confession deeply blamed himself for some hesitation he had felt, when baleful advice was given him.

A little after this the Abbess of Fontevrault came to see him. The King’s mother Eleanor, her guest, had been sent for in a hurry. The king had been hurt. A serf of Achard of Châlus had ploughed up a golden relic, an emperor with his family seated round a golden table. Ademar of Limoges had seized it. Richard demanded the whole and was after it sword in hand. The holders were in Castle Châlus, short of weapons but not of valour, and held out gallantly armed with frying-pans and whatnot. The place was undermined. Richard, without his hauberk, was directing the crash, when a man pulled an arrow from the mortar; aimed it and hit him on the neck and side. He went to his tent, and plucked at it, broke it off; was operated upon; would not keep quiet. The wound turned angry and then black, and the Lion lay dying. He made his will, a generous and charitable one, confessed his sins, was houselled and anhealed, and died on Passion Tuesday, April 6th. His brain and bowels were buried at Charroux, his heart at Rouen, and his body at his father’s feet, in penitence, in the nunnery of Fontevrault. Hugh was on his way to the Cathedral at Angers to take duty the next day, Palm Sunday, when Gilbert de Lacy, a clerk, rode up to him and told him of the king’s death and of the funeral next   day in Fontevrault. Hugh groaned deeply and announced at Angers that he should set out at once for that place. Every one begged and prayed that he would do no such thing. The mere rumour of the king’s death had as usual let loose all the forces of disorder. Robbery, violence, and general anarchy were up. His own servants had been held up and robbed of forty silver marks, and the interregnum was more dreadful than any tyranny. What is the use of such charitable designs if you merely get left in the wilds by robbers, bare of carriage and clothes? they asked. His answer was worthy of a man who lived in holy fear and no other. “We are all well aware what things can happen—fearful to the fearful—on this journey. But I think it a thing much more fearful that I should be coward enough to fail my late lord and king, by being away at such a crisis, by witholding my faith and grace from him in death, which I always showed him warmly in his life. What of the trouble he gave us, by giving in too much to the evil advice of those who flattered him? Certainly when I was with him, he never treated me but most honourably, never dismissed me unheard, when I made him some remarks face to face upon my business. If he wronged me when I was away, I have put it down to the spite of my detractors, not to his wickedness or malice. I will, therefore, pay him back to my power the honours he so often bestowed upon me. It will not be my fault if I do not help warmly at his obsequies. Say robbers do meet me on the road, say they do take the horses and carry off the robes, my feet will travel all the fleeter, because they   are lightened from the vestment baggage. If they really tie my feet and rob me of the power of moving, then and then only will be a real excuse for being absent in the body, for it will be caused not by vice but by outside obstacles.” He left his friends in the city and almost all his stuff, took one minor clerk, one monk, and a tiny train and set out. On the way he heard that the poor Queen Berengaria was at Castle Beaufort, so he left the doubtful highway for a dangerous forest track to visit her. He soothed her almost crazy grief, bid her bear grief bravely and face better days cautiously, said Mass for her, blessed her and her train, and went back at once. He got to Saumur the same day, where he was greeted with a sort of ovation by the townsfolk and was entertained by Gilbert de Lacy, who was studying there. Next day, Palm Sunday, he sped on to Fontevrault and met the bearers just at the doors. He paid all the royal honours he could to his late Master and was entertained at the Monastery. For three days he ceased not to say Mass and the Psalms for the kings lying there, as for all the faithful who lay quiet in Christ, prayed for their pardon and the bliss of everlasting light. A beautiful picture this of the brave old bishop in the Norman Abbey Church, where two kings, his friend and his forgiven foe, lay “shrouded among the shrouded women” in that Holy Week of long ago!

This compassion was not only a matter of honour, but of faith. It was one of the principles of his life and conduct that hereby was set forth the love of God, and applied to the needs of man. He used often to say that countless other things manifested the boundless   love of God to men, but of those we know, these surpass the greatness of all the rest, which He ceases not to bestow before man’s rise and after his setting. “To touch lightly a few of these in the case of men who rise and set: God the Son of God gave for each man before he was born the ransom of His own death. God the Father sent His own same Son into the world to die for the man: God the Holy Ghost poured Himself out an earnest for him. So together the whole Trinity, one God, together set up the Sacraments by which he is born, cleansed, defended, and strengthened, gave the props of His own law to rule and teach him, and generously made provision for his good by other mysterious means. When man’s fitful life is past and its course cut off by death, when his once dearest look on him now with aversion, when parents and children cast him forth with anxious haste from the halls once his, God’s most gracious kindness scorns not what all others despise. Then straightway He ordains not only angelic spirits to the ward of the soul at its return to its Maker, but He sends for the burial service those who are first and foremost of His earthly servants, to wit the priests and others in the sacred orders. And this is His command to them: ‘Behold,’ He says, ‘My priests and caretakers of My palaces in the world, behold My handiwork. I have always loved it. I spared not My only Son for it but made Him share in its mortality and its death. Behold, I say, that is now become a burden to its former lovers and friends. They crowd to cast it out and drive it forth. Away, then, speed and help My refugee: take up the Image of My Son, crucified   for it: take instruments for incense and wax. Ring out the signals of My Church for a solemn assembly; raise high your hymnal voices, open the doors of My house and its inner shrines: place near to the altar, which holds the Body of My Son, what is left of that brother or sister; finally, cover him a bier with costly palls, for at last he triumphs: crowd it with lamps and candles, circle round him, overthrown as he is, with helping crowds of servants. Do more. Repeat the votive offering of My Son. Make the richest feast, and thus the panting spirit, restless and weary with the jars of the wonted mortality it has just laid by, may breathe to strength: and the flesh, empty for the while of its old tenant, and now to be nursed in the lap of the Mother Earth, may be bedewed with a most gracious holiness, so that at the last day when it is sweetly reunited to its well-known companion, it may gladly flower anew and put on with joy the everlasting freshness.” This was no sudden seizure and passing emotion at the romance of funerals. He issued a general order in his diocese forbidding parish priests to bury the bodies of grown persons, if he were by to do it. If it were a case of good life, the more need to honour; if of an evil life, such would all the more yearn for greater succour. So he went to all, and if they were poor he ordered his almoner to find the lights and other requirements. Any funeral would bring him straight from his horse to pray at the bier. If he had no proper book wherein he might read without halting (and his eyes waxed dim at the last) he would stand near the officiant, chaunt the psalms with him, say the amens, and be clerk, almost a laic. If he had the right   book, he would be priest, say the prayers, use the holy water, swing the censer, cast on the mould, then give shrift and benison and go on his way. If the place were a large city and many bodies came for burial he did just the same until all were finished. Potentates expecting to eat bread with him were often vexed and complained at these delays; but, host or guest, he had more appetite for holy than for social functions. King Richard at Rouen, like his father before him, with all the Court and the Royal Family, when they invited Hugh to table, had to keep fasting while Hugh performed these higher duties without clipping or diminishing the office. When the king’s servants chafed, and would have spurred him on, he would say, “No need to wait for us. Let him eat in the Lord’s name;” and to his friends, “It is better for the king to eat without us, than for our humility to pass the Eternal King’s order unfulfilled.” Near Argentan, in Normandy, he once found a new grave by the roadside and learnt that a beggar-boy lay there. The priest had let him lie there, because there was no fee and no one would carry him to the church-yard. Hugh was deeply grieved, said the office himself, and rattled that priest pretty smartly to his bishop for denying Christian burial to the penniless and needy.

Once while the cathedral works were being carried on, a mason engaged on the fabric asked him for pontifical shrift for a brother who had just died. It was winter, and the feast of St. Stephen. Hugh promptly gave the absolution, and then asked if the body were yet buried. When he learnt that it was only being watched in a somewhat distant church,   he ordered three horses instantly, one for himself, one for his outrider, and one for his chaplain; but as only two were to be had he sent the chaplain on ahead, himself followed with a monk and a couple of servers, and devoutly buried not only the mason’s brother, but five other bodies. Another time, when the Archdeacon of Bedford gave a large and solemn feast to the dignified clergy—who, by the way, seldom shine in these narratives—the bishop so wearied them by his funereal delays that they explained their impatience to him not without some tartness of reproof. His only reply was, “Why do you not recall the voice of the Lord, who said with His holy lips, My meat is to do the will of My Father in heaven?” Another time, again, one hot spring when there was a general meeting of magnates, he heard that one of the prelates was dead.16 The man was an outrageous guzzler and toper, but Hugh prayed earnestly for him, and then asked where he was to be buried. The now unromantic spot of Bermondsey was to be the burying ground, and the funeral was on the very day and hour of the Westminster gathering, in which matters deeply interesting to Lincoln were to be handled. No one of the bishops or abbots would stir out for their detected dead fellow, but “to desert him in his last need” was impossible to his saintlier brother. He must be off to bury the man, council or no council. The body had been clad in an alb and chasuble. Its face was bare and black, and the gross frame was bursting from its clothes. Every one else had a gum, an essence or incense; but Hugh, who was   peculiarly sensitive to malodours, showed nothing but tenderness for the corrupt mortality, and seemed to cherish it as a mother a babe. The “sweet smelling sacrifice” shielded him in his work of mercy, they said.

William of Newburgh, a writer much given to ghost stories, tells a Buckingham tale of a certain dead man who would walk. He fell violently upon his wife first, and then upon his brothers, and the neighbours had to watch to fend him off. At last he took to walking even in the day, “terrible to all, but visible only to a few.” The clergy were called; the archdeacon took the chair. It was a clear case of Vampire. The man must be dug up, cut to bits, and burnt. But the bishop was very particular about the dead, and when they asked his leave he was indignant at the proposal. He wrote instead a letter with his own hand, which absolved the unquiet spirit. This was laid upon the dead man’s breast, and thenceforward he rested in peace, as did his alarmed neighbours. Whatever we think of the tale, the tender reverent spirit of the bishop is still a wonder. Although greatly given to an enthusiasm for the saints, a puzzling enthusiasm for their teeth, nails, plaisters, and bandages, Hugh was looked upon as an enemy to superstition, and was an eager suppressor of the worship of wells and springs, which still show how hard the Pagan religion dies. He found and demolished this “culture” at Wycombe and Bercamstead.17

The great theological question of Hugh’s time was   certainly the Eucharistic one. Eucharistic doctrine grew, as the power of the Church grew; as the one took a bolder tone so did the other. The word Transubstantiation (an ambiguous term to the disputants who do not define substance) had been invented by Peter of Blois, but not yet enjoined upon the Church by the Lateran Council of 1215. The language of the earlier fathers, of St. Bernard, did not suffice. Peter Lombard’s tentative terms had given way to less reserved speech. Thomas Aquinas, not yet born, was to unite the rival factions which forked now into Berengarius, who objected to the very terms Body of Christ, &c., always used for the Sacrament; and now into some crude cannibal theories, which found support in ugly miracles of clotted chalices and bleeding fingers in patens. Abelard had tried to hush the controversy by a little judicious scepticism, but the air was full of debate. If learned men ignored the disputes the unlearned would not. Fanatical monks on the one side and fanatical Albigenses on the other, decried or over-cried the greatest mysteries of the faith, and brawled over the hidden manna. Hugh’s old Witham monk Ainard had once preached a crusade against the blasphemers of the Sacraments, and is mentioned with honour for this very thing by Hugh’s intimate and biographer. The saint’s conspicuous devotion at the Mass, the care with which he celebrated and received, of themselves would point to a peculiarly strong belief in the Invisible Presence. Christians are, and have always been, lineally bound to believe in the supreme necessity of the Lord’s Marriage Supper to the soul’s health and obedience. They   are bound to use the old language, “This is My Body.” In earlier days, when Church thinkers were all Platonists, or at least Realists, the verity of the Sacrament was the Idea behind it. The concrete veils of that Idea were hallowed only by their use, association, and impact. But when after the crusades Aristotle was no longer the Bishop of Arians, but now the supreme philosopher, the language hitherto natural to piety had either to be changed or infused by violence with new senses, or both. The latter half of the twelfth century saw this unhappy deadlock between history and reason, and made strenuous efforts to compose the strife. So far as we may judge, upon a difficult question, where little must be written and much would be required to express an exact opinion, Hugh seems to have held that by mystic sanctification the host is turned into Christ’s Body; that this conversion is not a sudden but a gradual one, until the Son offers Himself anew, and hence the Sacrifice may be said to be repeated. The story which illustrates this position best is that of the young clerk who came to him at Buckden. The bishop had just been dedicating a large and beautiful chalice and upbraiding the heavily-endowed dignitaries for doing nothing at all for the poorly served churches from which they drew their stipends. Then he said Mass, and the clerk saw Christ in his hands, first as a little child at the Oblation, when “the custom is to raise the host aloft and bless it”; and again when it is “raised to be broken and consumed in three pieces,” “as the Son of the Highest offering Himself to the Father for man’s salvation.” The clerk tells him of the double vision—the voucher of a message   sent by his late crusading father, who warned him to tell the archbishop, through the Bishop of Lincoln, that the evil state of the church must be amended. The message and the messenger seem to answer exactly to the monk of Evesham, whose Dantesque revelations18 are here almost quoted. The wrath of God was incurred by the unchaste living priests, who so behaved that the Sacraments were polluted, and by the manner in which archdeacons and others trafficked in bribes. Hugh heard the story at the altar, wept, dried the eyes of both, kissed the young man and brought him into the meal afterwards, and urged him to become a monk. This he did, and became the Monk of Evesham aforesaid. There is no necessary advance in Eucharistic doctrine in this story, for a similar vision was given to King Edward the Confessor, and Hugh was so reticent about such things that his chaplain Adam never dared to ask him, although he dreamed that he asked him and was snubbed for his pains. “Although then, when you say, and more often, the Lord deigned to reveal this and other things to me, what do you want in the matter?” In his last journey to Jouay,19 an old, feeble and withered priest, who would not dine with him as the parish priest was wont, came to ask him to see a wonder and to beg for his prayers. His story was that he, being in mortal sin, blind and weak in faith and practices, was saying Mass, and doubting whether so dirty a sinner could really handle so white and stainless a glory. When the fraction took place, blood dripped from the host and it grew into flesh. He dropped the new thing   into the chalice, covered it up, dismissed the people, and got papal absolution, and now would fain show the wonder. The lesser men were agape for the sight, but Hugh answered, “In the Lord’s name let them keep the signs of their infidelity to themselves. What are they to us? Are we to be astonished at the partial shows of the Divine gift, who daily behold this heavenly sacrifice whole and entire with most faithful gaze of mind? Let him, who beholds not with the inner sight of faith the whole, go and behold the man’s little scraps with his carnal vision.” He then blessed the priest and dismissed him, and rebuked his followers for curiosity, and gave them a clear Eucharistic lesson not repeated for us, upon what faith lays down in the matter. From his speech then and elsewhere the good Adam gathered that Hugh often saw what others only believed to be there, the “bared face of the inner Man.”

Far less conjectural is the splendid stand which he made for chastity of life, at a time when the standard in such matters was lax both in the world and also in the church. It came as a surprise to his contemporaries that he should disapprove of the romantic ties between King Henry and fair Rosamond. That lady was buried at Godstowe by her royal lover, who draped her tomb, near the high altar, with silk, lamps, and lighted candles, making her the new founder, and for her sake raising the house from poverty and meanness to wealth and nobleness of building. While Hugh was earnestly praying at the altar (in 1191) he espied this splendid sepulchre. He asked whose it was, and when he learned said sternly, “Take her hence, for she was a whore. The love between the king and her was unlawful and adulterous. Bury her with the other dead outside the church, lest the Christian religion grow contemptible. Thus other women by her example may be warned and keep themselves from lawless and adulterous beds.” So far from being harsh, this decision to allow of no royal exceptions to the ten commandments was probably the kindest, strongest, and most wide-reaching protest that could be made against an unhappy and probably growing evil. This is of a piece with many other passages in his life, but hardly worth dwelling upon because the lawless loves, which in that day were too lightly regarded, in this day have usurped the sole title of immorality to themselves, as if there were not six other deadly sins besides. The best justification of the sentence is just this surprise with which it was received.

  CHAPTER VIII
HUGH THE BUILDER

First of all we must remember that in his age it was part of the education of a gentleman to know something about building. Hugh’s grandfather must have built the old keep of Avalon Castle, which still stands above the modern château, and a family whose arms are, on a field or the eagle of the empire sable, were builders, both of necessity and of choice. When every baron, or at least every baron’s father, had built himself a castle, planned and executed under his own eye; when King Richard in person could plan and superintend the building of his great Castle Saucy, the Château Gaillard, it is not wonderful that Hugh also should be ready and willing to do much in stone and mortar. Then, again, he must have had some   architectural training at the Grande Chartreuse. The first buildings of wood were overthrown in 1126 by an avalanche, and Guigo, the fifth prior, had refounded the whole buildings after that date. The upper church, since then a chapter house, was built in Romanesque style, with round arches, two rose windows, and three sanctuary windows with wide splays. In 1150 Humbert, Count of Savoy, founded a beautiful chapel and a guest house for visitors; and even later than this there is a good deal of building going on at the lower house, farm buildings, guest house, and possibly even a church during the very time that Hugh was monk and procurator. Even if he took no personal part in any of these last works, he must have known and heard much of the art from men, who had done or were doing it. But it would not be rash to conclude that he had an apprenticeship in building before he set foot on English soil, and as well by education as by inheritance knew something of this work.

What was done at Witham we cannot now fully tell, for everything has perished of the upper house. The monks’ church would be of stone, and probably was very like the present Friary Church. The cells certainly would be of wood in the second stage, for they were of “weeps,” as we have seen, in the first. This part of the Charterhouse we have concluded stood in a field now called “Buildings,” but now so-called without visible reason.

When the inhabitants were removed to Knap in North Curry and elsewhere, they took their old rafters with them or sold these. Their walls seem to have been of mud and wattle, or of some unsaleable stuff, and these, no doubt, served for a time for the lay brethren, after a little trimming and thatching. But their church had to be looked to before it could serve for the worship of the conversi. The old inhabitants (near two hundred, Mr. Buckle thinks, rather generously), were still there up to Hugh’s time, and if their church was like their houses the wooden roof was much decayed and the walls none of the best. Hugh resolved upon a stone vault of the Burgundian type, followed at the Grande Chartreuse, and he therefore had to thicken the walls by an extra case. The building was next divided into three parts, with doors from the north and west, so that men might seek refuge in the Holy   Trinity from the dark of the world and its setting suns. The stone roof is supported upon small semi-octagonal vaulting shafts, ending in truncated corbels. This fondness for the number eight, which reappears markedly at Lincoln, has to do with St. Augustine’s explanations that eight (the number next to seven, the number of creation and rest) signifies the consummation of all things and Doomsday. Four is the number of the outer world, with its seasons and quarters; three of the soul of man, the reflection of God; and eight, therefore, which comes after the union of these, is judgment and eternal life. Hugh was, no doubt, his own architect (if such a word is not an anachronism here), but he employed Somerset builders, who left the mark of English custom upon this otherwise peculiar and continental looking building. The leper window has been noticed above. The only other building at Witham which pretends to bear traces of Hugh’s hand is the guest house, and this, as we have seen, may be at bottom the very house where Hugh hob-a-nobbed with King Henry.

The same style, the same severity, the same sacramental feeling no doubt marked the Conventual Church, and it is sad to think what great and pathetic memories perished with its destruction. If only the pigstyes and barns built out of these old stones could have been the richer for what was lost in the transit, they would have been the richest of their kind. For Hugh turned to this his first great work in the house of Martha with a peculiar relish, which was that of a lover more than of a man who had merely heaped up stones against the wind. If   Lincoln was his Leah, Witham was his dear Rachael. Hither he was translated, like Enoch or Elijah, from a vexing world for a time every year. The two parts of the Charterhouse were the embodiments of “justice and innocence.” Here was “the vine of the Lord of Hosts.” His cell was kept for him, and while all the world was hotly harvesting he was laying up here his spiritual stores. Here his face seemed to burn with the horned light of Moses, when he appeared in public. His words were like fire and wine and honey, but poised with discretion. Yet he never became a fanatical monk, nor like Baldwin, whom the Pope addressed as “most fervent monk, clever abbot, lukewarm bishop, and slack archbishop.” He warned his monastic brethren here that the great question at doom is not, Were you monk or hermit? but Did you show yourself truly Christian? The name is useless, or positively baleful, unless a man has the threefold mark—caritas in corde; veritas in ore; castitas in corpore—of love in the heart, truth on the lips, pureness in the body. Here he told them that chaste wedlock was as pure as continence and virginity, and would be blessed as high. He lived as he taught always, but here he seemed beyond himself. His buildings at Witham, enumerated in the Great Life, and not even planned before his time, are the major and minor churches, the cells for monks, the cloisters, the brothers’ little houses, and the guest chambers. The lay kitchen was a poor building of brushwood and thatch, six or seven paces from the guest house, the blaze of which, when it caught fire, could be seen from the glass windows of the west end of the lay church.   The wooden cells of the brothers lay round this in a ring. The guest house roof was of shingles. This kitchen fire took place at the last visit of the bishop while he was at the “night lauds.” He gave over the office when it broke out, signed the cross several times, and prayed before the altar, while the young men fought the flame. He had already often ordered a stone kitchen to be built in its place, and so no real harm was done, for the fire did not spread. The only question which arises is whether the present guest house is far enough west to square with this story. No mention is made of the fish ponds, but they are likely enough to have been prepared in his time, for the rule, which never allowed meat, did allow fish on festivals. Hugh had no notion of starving other people, but used to make them “eat well and drink well to serve God well.” He condemned an asceticism run mad, and called it vanity and superstition for people to eschew flesh when they had no such commandment, and substitute for it foreign vegetables, condiments for fat, and expensive fishes. He liked dry bread himself, and the drier the tastier, but he did all he could to spare others. Consequently, we may credit him with the fish ponds.

His work at Lincoln was on a much larger scale and happily much of it is still there, a goodly material for wonder, praise and squabbling. It was imposed upon him, for he found the Norman building more or less in ruins. This building consisted of a long nave, with a west front, now standing; and a choir, which ended something east of the present faldstool in a bow. At the east end of the nave was a tower,   and to the north and south of this tower were two short transepts, or porches. The tower was either not very high or else was shortened, and perhaps recapped to make it safe after the earthquake, for the comparatively small damage which it did when it fell upon the choir proves that it could not have been very massive. It fell in Grossetestes’ time and its details with it.

The first requisite for building is money: and money, as we have seen, was very hard to obtain in England just at this juncture. Three means by which Hugh raised it are known to us. The austere ideals of the Carthusian bishop, his plain vestments, his cheap ring, his simple clothes set free a good deal of the money of the see for this purpose. Then he issued a pastoral summons to the multitude of her sons to appear at least once a year at the mother church of Lincoln with proper offerings according to their power; especially rural deans, parsons, and priests through the diocese were to gather together at Pentecost and give alms for the remission of their sins and in token of obedience and recollection of their Lincoln mother. This, combined with a notice of detention of prebend for all non-resident and non-represented canons, must have brought the faithful up in goodly numbers to their ecclesiastical centre. If they were once there, the cracked and shored-up building and the bishop’s zeal and personal influence might be entrusted to loose their purse strings, especially as he led the way, both by donation and personal work, for he carried the hod and did not disdain to bring mortar and stones up the ladder like any mason’s ’prentice. Then, thirdly,   he established or used a Guild of St. Mary, a confraternity which paid for, and probably worked at, the glorious task. Its local habitation was possibly that now called John of Gaunt’s stables,20 but anyhow it stood good for a thousand marks a year. A mark is thirteen and fourpence; and six hundred and sixty six pounds odd, in days when an ox cost three shillings and a sheep fourpence was a handsome sum. It could not have been far short of £10,000 of our money.

It is evident from records and architecture alike that the building had to be begun from the very roots and foundations. In examining it we had better begin with the chroniclers. The Great Life is curiously silent about this work, and if we had no other records we should almost consider that the work was done under, rather than by, the bishop. He went to Lincoln “about to build on this mountain, like a magnificent and peaceful Solomon, a most glorious temple,” says his laconic friend Adam. “Also fifteen days before he died Geoffrey de Noiers (or Nowers) the constructor or builder of the noble fabric, came to see him. The erection of this fabric was begun from the foundations, in the renewal of the Lincoln church, by the magnificent love of Hugh to the beauty of God’s house.” The dying bishop thus spoke to him: “In that we have had word that the lord king with the bishops and leading men of this whole kingdom are shortly about to meet for a general assembly, hasten and finish all that is needful for the beauty and adornment about the altar of my lord and patron saint, John Baptist, for we wish this   to be dedicated by our brother, the Bishop of Rochester, when he arrives there with the other bishops. Yea, and we ourselves, at the time of the aforesaid assembly, shall be present there too. We used to desire greatly to consecrate that by our ministry; but since God has disposed otherwise, we wish that it be consecrated before we come thither on a future occasion.” This is all that Adam has to tell us. Giraldus Cambrensis says, “Item, he restored the chevet of his own church with Parian stones and marble columns in wonderful workmanship, and reared the whole anew from the foundation with most costly work. Similarly, too, he began to construct the remarkable bishop’s houses, and, by God’s help, proposed, in certain hope, to finish them far larger and nobler than the former ones.” Then again he says, “Item, he took pains to erect in choiceness, the Lincoln church of the blessed Virgin, which was built remarkably by a holy man, the first bishop of the same place, to wit the blessed Remigius, according to the style of that time. To make the fabric conformed to the far finer workmanship and very much daintier and cleverer polish of modern novelty, he erected it of Parian stones and marble columns, grouped alternately and harmoniously, and which set off one another with varying pictures of white and black, but yet with natural colour change. The work, now to be seen, is unique.” The Legenda says that Hugh carried stones and cement in a box for the fabric of the mother Church, which he reared nobly from the foundations. Other chroniclers say just the same, and one adds that he “began a remarkable episcopal   hall” as well. But far the most important account we have is that of the metrical life—written between 1220 and 1235. This gives us some of the keys to the intense symbolism of all the designs. Since a proper translation would require verse, it may be baldly Englished in pedagogic patois, as follows: “The prudent religion and the religious prudence of the pontiff makes a bridge (pons) to Paradise, toiling to build Sion in guilelessness, not in bloods. And with wondrous art, he built the work of the cathedral church; in building which, he gives not only his wealth and the labour of his people, but the help of his own sweat; and often he carries in a pannier the carved stones and the sticky lime. The weakness of a cripple, propped on two sticks, obtains the use of that pannier, believing an omen to be in it: and in turn disdains the help of the two sticks. The diet, which is wont to bow the straight, makes straight the bowed. O remarkable shepherd of the flock, and assuredly no hireling! as the novel construction of the Church explains. For Mother Sion lay cast down, and straitened, wandering, ignorant, sick, old, bitter, poor, homely and base: Hugh raises her when cast down, enlarges her straitened, guides her wandering, teaches her ignorant, heals her sick, renews her old, sweetens her bitter, fills her when empty, adorns her homely, honours her when base. The old mass falls to the foundation and the new rises; and the state of it as it rises, sets forth the fitting form of the cross. The difficult toil unites three whole parts; for the most solid mass of the foundation rises from the centre,21 the wall carries the   roof into the air. [So the foundation is buried in the lap of earth, but the wall and roof shew themselves, and with proud daring the wall flies to the clouds, the roof to the stars.] With the value of the material the design of the art well agrees, for the stone roof talks as it were with winged birds, spreading its wide wings, and like to a flying thing strikes the clouds, stayed upon the solid columns. And a sticky liquid glues together the white stones, all which the workman’s hand cuts out to a nicety. And the wall, built out of a hoard of these, as it were disdaining this thing, counterfeits to unify the adjacent parts; it seems not to exist by art but rather by nature; not a thing united, but one. Another costly material of black stones props the work, not like this content with one colour, not open with so many pores, but shining much with glory and settled with firm position; and it deigns to be tamed by no iron, save when it is tamed by cunning, when the surface is opened by frequent blows of the grit, and its hard substance eaten in with strong acid. That stone, beheld, can balance minds in doubt whether it be jasper or marble; but if jasper, dull jasper; if marble, noble marble. Of it are the columns, which so surround the pillars that they seem there to represent a kind of dance. Their outer surface more polished than new horn, with reflected visions, fronts the clear stars. So many figures has nature painted there that if art, after long endeavour, toils to simulate a like picture, scarce may she imitate nature. Likewise has the beauteous joining placed a thousand columns there in graceful order; which stable, precious, shining, with their stability carry on the whole work of the   church, with their preciousness enrich it, with their shine make it clear. Their state indeed is lofty and high, their polish true and splendid, their order handsome and geometric, their beauty fit and useful, their use gracious and remarkable, their stability unhurt and sharp. A splendid double pomp of windows displays riddles to the eyes, inscribing the citizens of the Heavenly City and the arms whereby they tame the Stygian tyrant.22 And two are greater, like two lights; of these the rounded blaze, looking upon the quarters of north and south, with its double light, lords it over all windows. They can be compared to the common stars, but these two are one like the sun, the other like the moon. So do these two candles lighten the head of the Church. With living and various colours they mimic the rainbow, not mimic indeed, but rather excel, for the sun when it is reflected in the clouds makes a rainbow: these two shine without sun, glitter without cloud.

These things, described but puerilely, have the weight of an allegory. Without it seems but as a shell, but within lies the kernel. Without it is as wax, but within is combed honey; and fire lightens more pleasantly in the shade. For foundation, wall roof, white carved stone, marble smooth, conspicuous and black, the double order of windows, and the twin windows, which, as it were, look upon the regions of north and south, are great indeed, in themselves, but figure greater things.

The foundation is the body, the wall man, the roof the spirit, the division of the Church threefold. The body possesses the earth, man the clouds, the spirit   the stars. The white and carved stone means the chaste and wise; the whiteness is modesty, the carving dogma. By the effigy of marble, smooth, shining, dark, the bride is figured, guileless, well conducted, working. The smoothness very rightly means guilelessness, the splendour good conduct, the blackness work. The noble cohort of the clergy lightening the world with light divine is expressed by the clear windows. The corresponding order can everywhere be observed. The Canonic is set forth by the higher order; the Vicarious by the lower; and because the canonic handles the business of the world, and the busy vicarious fulfils, by its obligations, divine matters, the top line of windows shines bright with a ring of flowers around it, which signifies the varying beauty of the world, the lower contains the names of the holy fathers. The twin windows, which afford the rounded blaze, are the two eyes of the Church, and rightly in these respects seem to be, the greater the bishop, and the lesser the dean. The North is Satan, and the South the Holy Ghost, which the two eyes look upon. For the bishop looks upon the South to invite, but the dean upon the North to avoid it. The one sees to be saved, the other not to be lost. The brow of the church beholds with these eyes the candles of Heaven and the darkness of Lethe. Thus the senseless stones enwrap the mysteries of the living stones, the work made with hands sets forth the spiritual work; and the double aspect of the Church is clear, adorned with double equipage. A golden majesty paints the entry of the choir: and properly in his proper image Christ crucified is shewn, and   there to a nicety the progress of His life is suggested. Not only the cross or image, but the ample surface of the six columns and two woods, flash with tested gold. The capitols23 cleave to the Church, such as the Roman summit never possessed, the wonderful work of which scarce the monied wealth of Crœsus could begin. In truth their entrances are like squares. Within a rounded space lies open, putting to the proof, both in material and art, Solomon’s temple. If of these the perfection really stays, the first Hugh’s work will be perfected under a second Hugh. Thus then Lincoln boasts of so great a sire, who blessed her with so many titles on all sides.”

The church itself is the best comment upon this somewhat obscure account, and it may be briefly divided into Pre-Hugonian, Hugonian, and Post-Hugonian parts. The first, the Norman centre of the west façade, does not concern us, except that its lovely face often looked down upon the great bishop in his dark or tawny cloak trimmed with white lambs’ wool, which hid his hair shirt. Except for this Norman work and the Norman font, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the whole is by or for Hugh, for his shrine, his influence, and his example, completed what his work, and his plans, never dreamed about. Yet these last are responsible for much. He built a cruciform church, beginning with the entrance to the choir, with the aisles on either side. The chapels of St. Edward Martyr and St. James24 form the base or step of the cross. The east transept, with all chapels adjoining, the choristers’ vestry,   antevestry, dean’s or medicine chapel, with its lovely door and the cupboards in the now floorless room above it, the vaulted passage and chamber adjoining, are all his. So are, possibly, the matchless iron screens between the two choirs (topped with modern trumpery). South-east of the Medicine Chapel is one of St. Hugh’s great mystic columns, and there are a pair of them. Where the Angel Choir now lifts its most graceful form and just behind the high altar, rose the semi-hexagonal east end, the opened honeycomb, where most fitly was placed the altar of St. John Baptist. It was somewhere in the walls of this forehead that the original bishop’s eye and dean’s eye were once fixed, possibly in the rounded eye sockets which once stood where Bishop Wordsworth and Dean Butler are now buried.25

When we look closely at this work, we are astonished at the bold freedom, and yet the tentative and amateur character of it. The builders felt their way as they went along, and well they might, for it was not only a new church but a new and finer style altogether. They built a wall. It was not strong enough, so they buttressed it over the mouldings. The almost wayward double arcade inside was there apparently, before the imposed vaulting shafts were thought about. The stones were fully shaped and carved on the floor, and then put in their positions. Hardly anything is like the next thing. Sometimes the pointed arch is outside, as in “St. James’” Chapel, sometimes inside   as in “St. Edward’s.” Look up at the strange vaulting above the choir, about the irregularity of which so much feigned weeping has taken place. It represents, maybe, the Spirit blowing where it listeth and not given by measure. So, too, mystic banded shafts are octagonal for blessedness, and they blossom in hidden crockets for the inner flowers of the Spirit, and there are honeycombs and dark columns banded together in joyful unity, all copied from nowhere, but designed by this holy stone poet to the glory of God. The pierced tympanum has a quatrefoil for the four cardinal virtues, or a trefoil for faith, hope, and charity. Compared with the lovely Angel Choir which flowered seventy years later, under our great King Edward, it may look all unpractised, austere; but Hugh built with sweet care, and sense, and honesty, never rioting in the disordered emotion of lovely form which owed no obedience to the spirit, and which expressed with great elaboration—almost nothing. He may have valued the work of the intellect too exclusively, but surely it cannot be valued too highly? The work is done as well where it does not as where it does show.

The bishop’s hall, which he began, could not have been much more than sketched and founded. It was carried on by one of his successors, Hugh de Wells (1209-1235), though one would like to believe that it was in this great hall that he entertained women, godly matrons, and widows, who sat by his side at dinner, to the wonder of monkish brethren. He would lay his clean hands upon their heads and bless them, sometimes even gently embrace them,   and bid them follow the steps of holy women of old. Indeed he had quite got over the morbid terror he once felt for these guardians of the Divine humanity, for he used often to say to them, “Almighty God has deserved indeed to be loved by the feminine sex. He was not squeamish of being born of a woman. Yea, and he has granted hereby a magnificent and right worthy privilege to all women folk. For when it is not allowed to man to be or to be named the Father of God, yet this has been bestowed upon the woman to be the parent of God.” The traces of his work at the other manor houses are wiped out by time. There is nothing at Stow; Buckden was built later; and the other footprints of this building saint are lost upon the sands of time.