CHAPTER III
PRIOR HUGH

It did not require much talent to see that the first requisite of the foundation was a little money, and consequently we find ten white pounds paid from the Exchequer to the Charterhouse brethren, and a note in the Great Life to say that the king was pleased with Hugh’s modesty, and granted him what he asked for. Next there was a meeting of all who had a stake of any kind in the place, who would be obliged to be removed lest their noise and movement should break the deep calm of the community. It was put to each to choose whether he would like a place in any royal manor, with cottage and land equal to those they gave up, or else to be entirely free from serfdom, and to go where they chose. It is noteworthy that some chose one alternative, some the other, not finding villeinage intolerable. Next came the question of compensation for houses, crops, and improvements, that the transfer might be made without injustice but with joy on both sides. Here Henry boggled a little. “In truth, my lord,” said the prior, “unless every one of them is paid to the   last doight for every single thing the place cannot be given to us.” So the king was forced to do a little traffic, which he considered to be a dead loss, and acquired some very old cottages with rotten rafters and cracked walls at a handsome price. The salesmen liked this new business; it filled their pockets, and they blessed the new influence. This good merchant had traded so as to gain both justice and mercy, but he tackled the king once more, with twinkling eye. “Well, my lord king, you see I am new and poor, yet I have enriched you in your own land with a number of houses.” The king smiled. “I did not covet riches of this nature. They have made me almost a beggar, and I cannot tell of what good such goods may be.” Hugh wanted this very answer. “Of course, of course,” he rejoined, “I see you do not reck much of your purchase. It would befit your greatness if these dwellings were handed over to me, for I have nowhere to lay my head.” The king opened his eyes and stared at his petitioner. “Thou wouldst be a fine landlord. Dost thou think we cannot build thee a new house? What on earth shouldest thou do with these?” “It does not befit royal generosity to ask questions about trifles. This is my first petition to thee, and why, when it is so small, should I be kept waiting about it?” The king merrily answered, “Hear the fellow! Almost using violence too, in a strange land. What would he do if he used force, when he gets so much out of us by words? Lest we should be served worse by him, he must have it so.” The cat was soon out of the bag. Each house was presented back to the man who had sold it, either to sell   or to remove as he chose, lest in any way Jerusalem should be built with blood.

Then the building began, but no more; for the ten white pounds did not go far, and the workmen angrily and abusively asked for wages. A deputation went off to Henry, who was collecting troops and dismissing them, ordering, codifying, defending, enlarging and strengthening his heterogeneous empire. Now he was on one side of the sea, now on the other. He promised succour, and the brethren brought back—promises. The work stopped, and the Prior endured in grim silence. Another embassage is sent, and again the lean wallets return still flabby. Then the brethren began to turn their anger against the Prior. He was slothful and neglectful for not approaching the king in person (although the man was abroad and busy). Brother Gerard, a white-haired gentleman, “very successful in speaking to the great and to princes,” fell upon his superior for glozing with a hard-hearted king and not telling him instantly to complete the buildings under pain of a Carthusian stampede. Not only was the Order wronged, but themselves were made fools of, who had stuck so long there without being able even to finish their mere dolls’ houses. Brother Gerard himself would be delighted to din something into the King’s ears in the presence of his prior. To this all the brethren said “Aye.” Hugh gratefully accepted their counsel, and added, “All the same, Brother Gerard, you will have to see to it that you are as modest as you are free in your discourse. It may well be, that in order to be able to know us well, that sagaciously clever and inscrutable minded prince   pretends not to hear us, just to prove our mettle. Doubtless he knows that it belongs to that perfection which we profess to fulfil, that lesson of our Lord which tells us, ‘In your patience ye shall possess your souls,’ and that too of most blessed Paul, ‘In all things let us shew forth ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience.’ But much patience is assured in this, if much longsuffering bears with much gentleness much that opposes and thwarts. For patience without longsuffering will not be much, but short; and without gentleness will merely not exist.” So said, Hugh Gerard and old Ainard (a man of immense age and curious story) set out to the king. They were all received like angels, with honour, polite speeches, excuses, instant promises, but neither cash nor certain credit. Then Gerard fumed and forgot the advice of his superior, and broke out into a furious declaration that he was off and quit of England, and would go back to his Alpine rocks, and not conflict with a man who thought it lost labour to be saved. “Let him keep the riches he loves so well. He will soon lose them, and leave them to some ungrateful heir or other. Christ ought not to share in them; no, nor any good Christian.” These, and harsher words, too, were Gerard’s coaxes. Poor Hugh used often, in after life, to remember them with horror. He got red and confused. He told his brother to speak gentlier, to eschew such terms, or even to hold his tongue: but Gerard (of holy life, grey head, and gentle blood) scolded on without bridle. Henry listened in a brown study. Neither by look, nor word, did he appear hit. He let the monk rate, kept silence and self control, and when   the man had talked himself out, and an awkward silence reigned, he glanced at Hugh’s confused and downcast face. “Well, good man,” he said, “and what are you thinking about within yourself? You are not preparing to go off too, and leave our kingdom to us, are you?” The answer came humbly and gently, but with perfect manliness. “I do not despair of you so far, my lord. I am rather sorry for all your hindrances and business, which block the salutary studies of your soul. You are busy, and when God helps, we shall get on well with these health-giving projects.” Henry felt the spell at once; flung his arms round Hugh, and said with an oath, “By my soul’s salvation, while I live and breathe, thou shalt never depart from my kingdom. With thee I will share my life’s plans, and the needful studies of my soul.” The money was found at once, and a royal hint given. The demon blood of the Angevins, which frightened most men, and kept Henry in loneliness, had no terrors for Hugh; and Henry could hardly express the pleasure he felt in a rare friendship which began here. He loved and honoured no other man so much, for he had found a man who sympathised with him without slavishness, and whose good opinion was worth having. This close friendship, combined with physical likeness, made it generally believed that Hugh was Henry’s own son. Hugh did not always agree with the king, and if he felt strongly that any course was bad for king and kingdom would say so roundly in direct words of reproof, but withal so reasonably and sweetly that he made “the rhinoceros harrow the valleys” after him, as his biographer quaintly puts it,   glancing at Job. The counsel was not limited to celestial themes. Hugh checked his temper, softened his sentences, and got him to do good turns to churches and religious places. He unloosed the king’s rather tight fist, and made him a good almsgiver. One offence Hugh was instant in rebuking—the habit of keeping bishoprics and abbacies vacant. He used also to point out that unworthy bishops were the grand cause of mischiefs in God’s people, which mischiefs they cherished, caused to wax and grow great. Those who dared to promote or favour such were laying up great punishments against the Doomsday. “What is the need, most wise prince, of bringing dreadful death on so many souls just to get the empty favour of some person, and the loss of so many folk redeemed by Christ’s death? You invoke God’s anger, and you heap up tortures for yourself hereafter.” Hugh was for free canonical election, with no more royal interference than was required to prevent jobbery and quicken responsibility.

The two friends visited each other often, and the troubles of Henry’s last years were softened for him by his ghostly friend. It is quite possible that Hugh’s hand may be traced in the resignation of Geoffrey Plantagenet, the king’s dear illegitimate son, who was (while a mere deacon) bishop-elect of Lincoln from 1173 to 1181. From the age of twenty to twenty-eight he enjoyed the revenues of that great see without consecration. The Pope objected to his birth and his youth. Both obstacles could have been surmounted, but Geoffrey resigns his claims in the Epiphany of the latter year, and gets a chancellorship with five hundred marks in England and the same in   Normandy. His case is a bold instance of “that divorce of salary from duty” which even in those times was thoroughly understood.

There is a story, one might almost say the usual story, of the storm at sea. The king with a fleet is between Normandy and England, when a midnight storm of super-Virgilian boisterousness burst upon them. After the manner of Erasmus’ shipwreck, every one prays, groans, and invokes both he and she saints. The king himself audibly says, “Oh, if only my Charterhouse Hugh were awake and instant at his secret prayers, or if even he were engaged with the brethren in the solemn watch of the divine offices, God would not so long forget me.” Then, with a deep groan, he prayed, “God, whom the William Prior serves in truth, by his intervention and merits, take kindly pity upon us, who for our sins are justly set in so sore a strait.” Needless to say the storm ceased at once, and Henry felt that he was indeed upon the right tack, both nautically and spiritually. Whatever view we take of this tale (storms being frequent, and fervent prayers of the righteous availing much), the historic peep into King Henry’s mind is worth our notice. The simplicity and self-abasement of his ejaculation shew a more religious mind than some would allow to him.

Anyhow, the prior was hard at work. He soon transformed the “weeps” into stone. He built the two houses, the friary for the lay brethren and the monastery for the monks. He prayed, read, meditated and preached. His body slept, but his heart woke, and he repeated “Amens” innumerable in his holy dreams. On feast days, when the brethren   dined together, he ate with them, and then he had the meal sauced with reading. If he ate alone, he had a book by his trencher of dry bread rarely garnished with relishes. A water pot served him for both flagon and tureen. He allowed himself one little human enjoyment. A small bird called a burnet made friends with him and lived in his cell, ate from his fingers and his trencher, and only left him at the breeding season, after which it brought its fledged family back with it. This little friend lived for three years with the prior, and to his great grief came no more in the fourth. The learned have exhausted their arts to discover what a burnet can be, and have given up the chase. Some would have him to be a barnacle goose, others a dab-chick or coot—none of which can fairly be classed as aviculæ small birds. Burnet is brown or red brown, and rather bright at that. We have it in Chaucer’s “Romaunt of the Rose” [4756]:

Not only the burnet bird felt the fascination of the prior, but monks drew towards Witham and men of letters also. Men of the world would   come to be taught the vanity of their wisdom; clergy whose dry times afflicted them found a rich meal of Witham doctrine well worth the spare diet of the place. The prior by no means courted his public, and the Order itself was not opened at every knuckle tap. Even those who were admitted did not always find quite what they wanted. We read of one man, a Prior of Bath, who left the Charterhouse because he “thought it better to save many souls than one,” and returned to what we should call parish work. Alexander of Lewes, a regular Canon, well versed in the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), found the solitude intolerable to his objective wits. He was not convinced of the higher spirituality of co-operative hermitages. He found it too heavy to believe that there was no Christendom outside the Charterhouse plot, and no way of salvation except for a handful of mannikins. Alexander, with stinging and satiric terms, left in a huff, followed by acrimonious epithets from his late brethren. He became a monk at Reading, and filled a larger part upon a more spacious stage, and yet would have most gladly returned; but the strait cell was shut to him relentlessly and for ever. Andrew, erst sacristan of Muchelney, was another who left the Order for his first love, but his dislike of the life was less cogently put. It was not exactly that the prior could not brook opposition: but he hated a man who did not know his own mind, and nothing would induce him to allow an inmate who eddied about.

The Charterhouse now had ecclesiastical independence. The bishop’s power ended outside its pale. Bruton Convent could tithe the land no more,   nor feed their swine or cattle there, nor cut fuel, instead of which the rectory of South Petherton, and its four daughter chapelries, was handed over to this bereaved convent. This was in April, 1181. This transaction was some gain to the game-loving king, for the Withamites ate neither pork nor beef, and so the stags had freer space and more fodder.

But nevertheless the monks’ poverty was almost ludicrous. Hugh wanted even a complete and accurate copy of the scriptures, which he used to say were the solitary’s delight and riches in peace, his darts and arms in war, his food in famine and his medicine in sickness. Henry asked why his scribes did not make copies. The answer was that there was no parchment. “How much money do you want?” asked the king. “One silver mark,” was the ungrasping request. Henry laughed and ordered ten marks to be counted out and promised a complete “divine library” besides. The Winchester monks had just completed a lovely copy (still in existence). King Henry heard from a student of this fine work and promptly sent for the prior. With fair words and fine promises he asked for the Bible. The embarrassed monk could not well say no, and the book was soon in Hugh’s hands. This Prior Robert shortly after visited Witham and politely hoped the copy was satisfactory. If not, a better one could be made, for great pains had been taken by St. Swithun’s brethren to make this one agreeably to their own use and custom. Hugh was astonished. “And so the king has beguiled your Church thus of your needful labour? Believe me, my very dear brother, the Library shall be restored to you instantly. And I   beg most earnestly through you that your whole fraternity will deign to grant pardon to our humility because we have ignorantly been the occasion of this loss of their codex.” The prior was in a fright, as well he might be, at the shadow of the king’s wrath. He assured Hugh that his monks were all delighted at the incident. “To make their delight continue, we must all keep quiet about the honest restoration of your precious work. If you do not agree to take it back secretly, I shall restore it to him who sent it hither; but if you only carry it off with you, we shall give him no inkling of the matter.” So the Winchester monks got back their Bible, and Witham got the said Prior Robert as one of its pupils instead, fairly captured by the electric personality of the Carthusian.

Though Hugh’s influence was very great, we must not quite suppose that the king became an ideal character even under his direction. There is an interregnum not only in Lincoln but in Exeter Diocese between Bishop Bartholomew and John the Chaunter, 1184-1186; one in Worcester between the translation of Baldwin and William de Northale, 1184-1186; and a bad one in York after the death of Roger, 1181, before King Richard appointed his half-brother Geoffrey aforementioned, who was not consecrated until August, 1191. But Hugh’s chief work at Witham was in his building, his spiritual and intellectual influence upon the men he came to know, in the direction of personal and social holiness: and, above all, he was mastering the ways and works of England so sympathetically that he was able to take a place afterwards as no longer a Burgundian but a thorough son of the nation and the church.   One instance may be given of his teaching and its wholesome outlook. He lived in an age of miracles, when these things were demanded with an insatiable appetite and supplied in a competitive plenty which seems equally inexhaustible, almost as bewildering to our age as our deep thirst for bad sermons and quack medicines will be to generations which have outgrown our superstitions. St. Hugh had drunk so deeply and utterly and with all his mind of the gravity and the humility which was traditional from the holy authors of the Carthusian Order, that “there was nothing he seemed to wonder at or to wish to copy less than the marvels of miracles. Still, when these were read or known in connection with holy men, he would speak of them gently and very highly respect them. He would speak of them, I say, as commending of those who showed them forth, and giving proof to those who marvelled at such things, for to him the great miracle of the saints was their sanctity, and this by itself was enough for guidance. The heartfelt sense of his Creator, which never failed him, and the overwhelming and fathomless number of His mighty works, were for him the one and all-pervading miracle.” If we remember that Adam, his biographer, wrote these words not for us, but for his miracle-mongering contemporaries, they will seem very strong indeed. He goes on to say that all the same, whether Hugh knew it or not, God worked many miracles through him, as none of his intimates could doubt, and we could rather have wished that he had left the saint’s opinion intact, for it breathes a lofty atmosphere of bright piety, and is above the controversies of our lower plane.

The time was now coming when Witham had to lose its prior. Geoffrey (son, not of fair Rosamond, but of Hickenay) had resigned in January, 1182. After sixteen months’ hiatus, Walter de Coutances, a courtier, was elected, ordained, and consecrated, and enthroned December, 1183; but in fifteen months he was translated to the then central See of Rouen and the wretched diocese had another fifteen months without a bishop, during which time (April 15, 1185, on holy Monday) an earthquake cracked the cathedral from top to bottom.2

In May, 1186, an eight-day council was held at Eynsham, and the king attended each sitting from his palace at Woodstock. Among other business done was the election, not very free election, to certain bishoprics and abbeys. Among the people who served or sauntered about the Court were the canons of Lincoln, great men of affairs, learned, and so wealthy that their incomes overtopped any bishop’s rent-roll, and indeed they affected rather to despise bishoprics—until one offered. The See of Lincoln had been vacant (with one short exception) for nearly eighteen years. It contained ten of the shires of England—Lincoln, Leicester, Rutland, Northampton, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Bedford, Buckingham, Oxford, and Hertford. The canons chose three men, all courtiers, all rich, and all well beneficed, viz., their dean, Richard Fitz Neal, a bishop’s bastard, who had bought himself into the treasurership; Godfrey de Lucy, one of their number, an   extravagant son of Richard the chief justice; and thirdly another of themselves, Herbert le Poor, Archdeacon of Canterbury, a young man of better stuff. But the king declared that this time he would choose not by favour, blood, counsel, prayer, or price; but considering the dreadful abuses of the neglected diocese he wished for a really good bishop, and since the canons could not agree he pressed home to them the Prior of Witham, the best man and the best-loved one. With shouts of laughter the canons heard the jest and mentioned his worship, his habit, and his talk, as detestable; but the king’s eye soon changed their note, and after a little foolishness they all voted for the royal favourite. The king approves, the nobles and bishops applaud, my lord of Canterbury confirms, and all seems settled. The canons rode off to Witham to explain the honours they have condescended to bestow upon its prior. He heard their tale, read their letters. Then he astonished their complacency by telling them that he could understand the king’s mind in the matter and that of Archbishop Baldwin, himself a Cistercian; but that they, the canons, had not acted freely. They ought to choose a ruler whose yoke and ways they could abide, and, moreover, they ought not to hold their election in the Court or the pontifical council, but in their own chapter. “And so, to tell you my small opinion, you must know that I hold all election made in this way to be absolutely vain and void.” He then bade them go home and ask for God’s blessing, and choose solely by the blessing and help of the Holy Ghost, looking not to king’s, bishop’s, nor any man’s approval. “That is the only   answer to return from my littleness. So go, and God’s good angel be with you.” They begged him to reconsider it, to see the king or the archbishop; but the prior was inflexible, and they left the Guest House in wonder not unmixed with delight. The king’s man was not the pet boor they had taken him for, but single-eyed, a gentleman, a clever fellow, and a good churchman. The very men who had cried out that they had been tricked now elected him soon and with one consent; and off they post again to Witham.

One would be glad to know what Henry thought of it all, and whether he liked the tutoring his courtiers got and were about to get. The humour,   shrewdness, tact, and piety combined must have appealed to his many-sided mind and now saddened heart. He had lost his heir and was tossed upon stormy seas, so perhaps he had small leisure to spare for the next act of the drama.

  CHAPTER IV
THE BISHOP ELECT AND CONSECRATE

Hugh knew well enough what the Chartreuse Chapter would say if the English meant to have him, and so he began his preparations at once. Other men fussed about fine copes, chasubles, and mitres, and dogged the clerical tailors, or pottered about in goldsmiths’ shops to get a grand equipment of goblets. To him the approaching dignity was like a black cloud to a sailor, or a forest of charging lances to the soldier under arms. He fell hard to prayer and repentance, to meditation upon the spiritual needs of his new duties, lest he should have holy oil on his head and a dry and dirty conscience. He gave no time to the menu of the banquet, to the delicacies, the authorities, and the lacquey-smoothed amenities of the new life. He was racked with misery at the bare imagination of the fruitless trouble of palace business exchanged for the fruitful quiet of his cell. He feared that psalms would give way to tussles, holy reading to cackle, inward meditation to ugly shadows, inward purity to outer nothingness. His words to the brethren took a higher and a humbler tone, which surprised them,   for even they were used to see bishoprics looked upon as plums, and sought with every device of dodgery. Yet here was a man who could keep his soul unhurt and cure the hurts of others, yet whose cry was, “In my house is neither bread nor clothing; make me not a ruler of the people.” St. Augustine’s fierce words upon the Good Shepherd and the hireling were in his mind. “The soul’s lawful husband is God. Whoso seeks aught but God from God is no chaste bride of God. See, brothers, if the wife loves her husband because he is rich she is not chaste. She loves, not her husband, but her husband’s gold. For if she loves her husband she loves him bare, she loves him beggared.” So Hugh prepared his soul as for a bridal with the coming bridegroom.

When the inevitable command came, more than three months after his first election, he meekly set out for his duties at “the mount of the Lord, not Lebanon,3 but Lincoln.” He was white in dress, white in face, but radiant white within. He sat a horse without trappings, but with a roll of fleece and clothes, his day and night gear. Around him pricked his clergy upon their gold-buttoned saddles. They tried various devices to get his bundle away to carry it upon their own cruppers, but neither jest nor earnest could unstrap that homely pack. The truth was that he would not allow himself to change his old simple habits one jot, lest he should develop the carnal mind. So they drew across Salisbury Plain and on to Marlborough. Here was the Court and a great throng, and this public disgrace of the pack was too much for the Lincoln exquisites. They cut   the straps of the objectionable bundle and impounded it. From Marlborough the cavalcade rode into London, and Hugh was consecrated on Sunday, September 21 (Feast of St. Matthew, the converted capitalist), 1186. King Henry was in fine feather, and, forgetting his rather near habits, produced some fine gold plate, a large service of silver, a substantial set of pots and pans, and a good sum of ready money to meet the expenses of the festive occasion. Without some such help a penniless Carthusian could hardly have climbed up that Lebanon at all, unless by the sore scandal of a suit to the Lincoln Jewry. This handsome present was made at Marlborough. William de Northalle was consecrated Bishop of Worcester on the same day, of whom nothing else transpires than that he died not long after, and is supposed to have been an old and toothless bishop promoted for his ready fees. The place of consecration was Westminster Abbey, in its præ-Edwardian state, and so no longer extant.

Hugh would undoubtedly sleep in the house in which he afterwards died. This lay at the back of Staple Inn, where the new bursar, whom the king had given him, bestowed the royal pots and crocks. Consecration like necessity brings strange bedfellows, and plain, cheap-habited Hugh, by gaudily trimmed William in his jewelled mitre, must have raised a few smiles that Sunday morning.

Hugh’s delays had ended with his prior’s order, and he saw nothing now to stay his journey northwards. With him rode Gilbert de Glanville, Bishop of Rochester, a malleus monachorum, a great hammerer of monks, and perhaps told off for the duty of   enthroning the new bishop to silence those who had a distaste for all monkery. Herbert le Poor, late rival candidate for the See, also pranced alongside with all the importance of a great functionary, whose archidiaconal duty it was to enthrone all bishops of the Province of Canterbury. For this duty he used to have the bishop’s horse and trappings and much besides; but alas! the new man slept at St. Catherine’s Priory on Michaelmas Eve and walked upon his bare toes to the cracked cathedral next morning. When he was fairly and ceremonially seated the archdeacon held out his practised palm for the customary fee (archdeacons are still fee-extracting creatures). He was astonished to hear the radical retort, “What I gave for my mitre” (it was a very cheap one) “that and no more will I give for my throne.” Both Herbert and with him Simon Magus fell backward breathless at this blow.4 But Hugh had a short way of demolishing his enemies, and the archdeacon appears hereafter as his stout follower knocked, no doubt, into a friend. All who were present at this ceremony had their penances remitted for thirteen days. Two other incidents are recorded of this time. One is that the bursar asked how many small fallow deer from the bishop’s park should be killed for the inauguration feast. “Let three hundred be taken, and if you find more wanted do not stickle to add to this number.” In this answer the reader must not see the witless, bad arithmetic of a vegetarian unskilled in catering, but a fine determination, first to feed all the poor folk of his metropolis with the monopolies of princes; and secondly,   to sever himself wholly and dramatically from the accursed oppression of the game and forest laws. When Hugh told the story at Court it served as a merry jest, often broken, no doubt, against game (but not soul) preserving prelates, but, as the sequel shows, there was method in it. The other incident is that in the convent after Matins, on the morning of his enthronement, he slept and heard a voice which comforted his doubtful heart, too fearful lest this step should not be for the people’s health or his own. “Thou hast entered for the waxing of thy people, for the waxing of salvation to be taken with thy Christ.”

The new bishop lived at his manor at Stowe (of which part of the moat and a farmhouse are now to be seen by the curious), a place parked and ponded deliciously. Almost as soon as he was installed a new swan came upon the waters, huge and flat-beaked, with yellow fleshings to his mandibles. This large wild bird dwarfed the tame swans into geese by comparison, and no doubt tame swans and geese were small things in those days compared to our selected fatlings. This bird drove off and killed the other swans, all but one female, with whom he companied but did not breed. The servants easily caught him and brought him to the bishop’s room as a wonder. The beast-loving man, instead of sending him to the spit, offered him some bread, which he ate, and immediately struck up an enthusiastic friendship with his master, caring nothing for any throngs about him. After a time he would nestle his long neck far up into the bishop’s wide sleeve, toying with him and asking him for things with pretty little   clatterings. The bird seemed to know some days before he was due that he was coming, for it flapped about the lake and made cries. It would leave the water and stalk through the house walking wide in the legs. It would neither notice nor brook any other man, but rather seemed jealous, and would hiss and flap away the rest of the company. If the bishop slept or watched, the swan would keep dogs and other animals at bay. With true spiritual instinct it would peck hard at the calves of chaplains. If the bishop was abed no one was allowed near him without a most distressing scene, and there was no cajoling this zealous watchman. When the bishop went away the bird would retire to the middle of its pool, and merely condescend to take rations from the steward; but if its friend returned it would have none of servants. Even two years’ interval made no difference to the faithful swan. It prophetically proclaimed his unexpected arrival. When the carts and forerunners arrived (with the household stuffs) the swan would push boldly in among the crowd and cry aloud with delight when at last it caught the sound of its master’s voice, and it would go with him through the cloister to his room, upstairs and all, and could not be got out without force. Hugh fed it with fingers of bread he sliced with his own hand. This went on for nearly all Hugh’s episcopate. But in his last Easter the swan seemed ill and sullen, and kept to his pond. After some chase they caught him in the sedge, and brought him in, the picture of unhappiness, with drooping head and trailing wing, before the bishop. The poor bird was to lose its friend six months after, and seemed to resent the cruel severance   of coming death, though it was itself to live for many a day after its master had gone home to his rest. There, floating conspicuous on the lake, it reminded orphaned hearts of their innocent, kind, and pure friend who had lived patiently and fearlessly, and taken death with a song—the new song of the Redeemed.

The first act of the new bishop was naturally to enlist captains for the severe campaign, and he ran his keen eye over England and beyond it for wise, learned, and godly men who could help a stranger. He wrote a touchingly humble letter to Archbishop Baldwin to help him to find worthy right-hand men, “for you are bred among them, you have long been a leader, and you know them ‘inside and under the skin,’ as the saying goes.” Baldwin, an Exeter labourer by birth, by turns a schoolmaster, archdeacon, Cistercian abbot, Bishop of Worcester, and primate—a silent, dark, strong man, gentle, studious, and unworldly—was delighted at the request. He sent off Robert of Bedford, an ardent reformer and brilliant scholar, and Roger Roldeston, another distinguished scholar, who afterwards was Dean of Lincoln. These, like Aaron and Hur, upheld the lawgiver’s hands, and they, with others of a like kidney, soon changed the face of affairs. Robert died early, but Roger was made Archdeacon of Leicester, confessor, and at the end executor to the bishop. After gathering captains the next thing was an eight-fold lash for abuses—decrees (1) against bribes; (2) against vicars who would not sing Mass save for extra pay; (3) against swaggering archdeacons who suspended churches, and persons beyond their beat.   These gentlemen, in the absence of a bishop, seem to have grown into popes at the least. (4) Mass not to be laid as a penance upon any non-priestly person. This was a nimble way by which confessors fined penitents to their own profit. (5) Annual and other customary masses to be said without temporal gain. (6) Priestly administration only to be undertaken by those who are proved to be duly ordained by the archbishop or one of his suffragans: forged orders being plentiful. (7) Incumbents to be tonsured, and clergy to wear “the crown” instead of love-locks. (8) Clergy not to sue clergy in ecclesiastical cases before civil justices, Erastian knaves being active, even then.

Next year brought a much more fighting foe, Godfrey the chief forestar. There was a Forest Assize only three years back, and a great outbreak of game preserving, dog licensing, bow confiscating, fines, imprisonment and slaughter, new rights for old tyrants, boys of twelve and clergy to be sworn to the hunting peace, mangling of mastiffs, banishment of tanners and parchmenters from woodlands—and if this was within the law, what could not be done without the law by these far away and favoured gamekeepers? The country groaned. Robbers and wolves could easily demolish those whom the foresters did not choose to protect, and the forest men went through the land like a scourge. Some flagrant injustice to one of Hugh’s men brought down an excommunication upon Godfrey, who sent off to the king in fury and astonishment; and Henry was in a fine fit of anger at the news, for the Conqueror long ago had forbidden unauthorised   anathemas against his men. Certain courtiers, thinking to put Hugh in the way of obliging the king, suggested that a vacant prebend at Lincoln should be given to one of themselves. The king sent a letter to that effect, which he did with some curiosity, suggesting this tit for tat. The messengers jingled through Oxford from Woodstock and found the bishop at Dorchester touring round his weedy diocese, who addressed the expectant prebendary and his friends with these words: “Benefices are not for courtiers but for ecclesiastics. Their holders should not minister to the palace, revenue, or treasury, but as Scripture teachers to the altar. The lord king has wherewith to reward those who serve him in his business, wherewith to recompense soldiers’ work in temporals with temporals. It is good for him to allow the soldiers of the highest King to enjoy what is set aside for their future necessities and not to agree to deprive them of their due stipends.” With these words he unhesitatingly sent the courtiers empty and packing. The fat was in the fire, and the angry courtiers took care that the chimney should draw. A man galloped off to say “Come to the king at once,” and when the bishop was nearing Rosamond’s bower, the king and his nobles rode off to the park, and sat down in a ring. The bishop followed at once. No one replied to his salute, or took the least notice of him. He laid hands upon a great officer next the king and moved him and sat down, in the circle of black looks. Then the king called for a needle. He had hurt one of his left fingers, and he sewed a stall upon it. The bishop was practised in silence, and was not put out by it.   At last he said gently, “You are very like your relatives in Falaise.” Henry threw himself back and laughed in a healthy roar. The courtiers who understood the sarcasm were aghast at its audacity. They could not but smile, but waited for the king, who, when he had had his laugh out, explained the allusion to the Conqueror’s leather dressing and gloving lineage. “All the same, my good man, you must say why you chose, without our leave, to put our chief forester under the ban, why moreover you so flouted our little request that you neither came in person to explain your repulse nor sent a polite message by our messengers.” Hugh answered simply that he knew the king had taken great trouble about his election, so it was his business to keep the king from spiritual dangers, to coerce the oppressor and to dismiss the covetous nonsuited. It would be useless and stupid to come to court for either matter, for the king’s discretion was prompt to notice proper action and quick to approve the right. Hugh was irresistible. The king embraced him, asked for his prayers, gave the forester to his mercy. Godfrey and his accomplices were all publicly flogged and absolved, and the enemy, as usual, became his faithful friend and supporter. The courtiers ceased to act like kites and never troubled him again. On the contrary, some of them helped him so heartily that, if they had not been tied by the court, he would have loved to have beneficed them in the diocese. But non-residence was one of the scandals of the age and Hugh was inflexible in this matter. Salary and service at the altar were never to be parted. Even the Rector of the University of Paris, who once said   how much he would like to be associated with Lincoln by accepting a canonry, heard that this would also be a great pleasure to the bishop, “if only you are willing to reside there, and if, too, your morals will keep pace with your learning.” The gentleman was stricter in scholarship than in life, but no one had ever taken the liberty to tell him of it, and he is said to have taken the hint. Herein Hugh was quite consistent. He would not take any amount of quadrivium as a substitute for honest living, and next after honest living he valued a peaceable, meek, conformist spirit, which was not always agape for division and the sowing of discords. He took some pains to compose quarrels elsewhere, as for instance, between Archbishop Baldwin and the monks of Canterbury. The archbishop wished to found a house of secular canons at Hackington in honour of SS. Stephen and Thomas of Canterbury. The monks were furious; the quarrel grew. Hugh thought and advised, when asked, that the question of division outweighed the use of the new church, and that it would be better to stop at the onset than to have to give up the finished work. But, objected Baldwin, holy Thomas himself wanted to build this church. “Let it suffice that you are like the martyr in proposing the same. Hear my simplicity and go no further.” He preached union with constant fervour, and used to say that the knowledge that his spiritual sons were all at his back made him fear neither king nor any mortal, “neither do I lose the inward freedom from care, which is the earnest of, and the practice for, the eternal calm. Nor do my masters (so he called his canons) break and destroy a   quiet that knows no dissent, for they think me gentle and mild. I am really tarter and more stinging than pepper, so that even when I am presiding over them at the chapter, the smallest thing fires me with anger. But they, as they ought, know their man of their choice and bear with him. They turn necessity into virtue and give place to me. I am deeply grateful to them. They have never opposed a single word of mine since I first came to live among them. When they all go out and the chapter is over, not one of them, I think, but knows I love him, nor do I believe I am unloved by a single one of them.” This fact and temper of mind it was which made it possible to work the large diocese, for, of course, the bishop did not act in any public matter without his clergy. But personally his work was much helped by his self-denial and simplicity of his life. He never touched flesh but often used fish. He would drink a little wine, not only for health, but for company’s sake. He was a merry and jest-loving table companion, though he never was undignified or unseemly. He would allow tumblers and musicians to perform at banquets, but he then appeared detached and abstracted rather than interested; but he was most attentive when meals were accompanied by readings about martyrs’ passions, or saints’ lives, and he had the scriptures (except the four gospels, which were treated apart) read at dinner and at the nightly office. He found the work of a bishop obliged him to treat that baggage animal, the body, better than of yore. His earlier austerities were avenged by constant pains in the bowels and stomach troubles, but in dedications of churches, ordinations, and other offices he would   out-tire and knock up every one else, as he went from work to work. He rose before dawn and often times did not break his fast till after midday. In hot summer weather, he would oblige his ministers (deacon, sub-deacon, acolytes, &c.) to take a little bread and wine lest they should faint at the solemn Mass. When they hesitated, he upbraided them with want of faith and of sense, because they could not obey orders or see the force of them. When he journeyed and crowds came to be confirmed themselves or to present their little ones, he would get off his horse at a suitable spot and perform that rite. Neither tiredness, weakness, haste, rough ground, nor rain would induce him to confirm from the saddle. A young bishop afterwards, with no possible excuse, would order the frightened children up among restive horses. They came weeping and whipped by insolent attendants at no small risk—but his lordship cared nothing for their woe and danger. Not so dear Father Hugh. He took the babes gently and in due order, and if he caught any lay assistants troubling them would reproach them terribly, sometimes even thrashing the rascals with his own heavy hand. Then he would bless the audience, pray for the sick, and go on with his journey.

He was passionately fond of children, not only because they were innocent, but because they were young: and he loved to romp with them—anticipating by nearly seven centuries the simple discovery of their charm, and he would coax half words of wondrous wit from their little stammering lips. They made close friends with him at once, just as did the mesenges or blue tits who used to come   from woods and orchards of Thornholm, in Lindsey, and perch upon him, to get or to ask for food.5

There is a story of a six months’ old infant which jumped in its mother’s arms to see him, waved its armlets, wagged its head, and made mysterious wrigglings (hitherto unobserved by bachelor monks) to greet him. It dragged his hand with its plump palm to its mouth as if to kiss it, although truth compels biographer Adam to acknowledge the kiss was but a suck. “These things are marvellous and to be deeply astonished at,” he says. Hugh gave the boy apples or other small apposites (let us hope it was not apples, or the consequences of such gross ignorance would be equally marvellous), but the child was too interested in the bishop to notice the gifts. The bishop would tell how while he was still Prior he once went abroad to the Carthusian Chapter and stopped with brother William at Avalon. There his nephew, a child who could not even speak, was laid down upon his bed and (above the force of nature) chuckled at him—actually chuckled. Adam expected these two to grow up into prodigies and heard good of the latter, but the former he lost sight of—a little low-born boy in Newark Castle. Hugh used to put his baby friends to school when they grew older. Benedict of Caen was one of these, and he slipped off Roger de Roldeston’s horse into a rushing stream, but was miraculously not drowned: and Robert of Noyon was another whom he picked up at Lambeth in the archbishop’s train and put to school with the nuns at Elstow.

These tender passages are to be contrasted with quite other sides to the man. Once an old rustic arrived late for a roadside confirmation. The bishop was in the saddle and trotting off to another place near, when the old fellow bawled after him that he, too, wished to be bishopped. Hugh more than once bade him hurry with the rest to the next place, but the man sat plump on the ground and said it was the bishop’s fault and not his if he missed that Grace. The prelate looked back, and at last pulled up, turned his horse, rode back, and was off saddle again, and had the rite administered swiftly; but having laid holy hands upon him, he laid also a disciplinary one, for he boxed the old fellow’s ears pretty smartly, which spanking some would have us to believe was a technical act of ritual, a sort of accolade in fact. The same has been suggested about the flogging of forester Godfrey; for the mere resonance of these blows it seems, is too much for the tender nerves of our generation. Another bumpkin with his son once ran after the bishop’s horse. The holy man descended, opened his chrism box, and donned his stole, but the boy had been confirmed already. The father wanted to change the boy’s name; it would bring him luck. The bishop, horrified at such paganism, asked the boy’s name. When he heard that it was John he was furious. “John, a Hebrew name for God’s Grace. How dare you ask for a better one? Do you want him called ‘hoe’ or ‘fork’? For your foolish request, take a year’s penance, Wednesday’s Lenten diet and Friday’s bread and water.”6

He was hardly abreast of his very legal time in reverence for the feudal system. One of his tenants died and his bailiffs seized the best thing he had, to wit, an ox, as heriot due to the lord. The poor widow in tears begged and prayed for her ox back again, as the beast was breadwinner for her young children. The seneschal of the place chimed in, “But, my lord, if you remit these and similar legal dues, you will be absolutely unable to hold the land at all.” The bishop heard him and leapt from his horse to the ground, which was very muddy. He dug both hands into the dirt. “Now I have got the land,” he said, “and yet I do remit the poor little woman her ox,” and then he flung the mud away, and lifting his eyes added, “I do not want the land down here; I want heaven. This woman had only two to work for her. Death has taken the better one and are we to take the other? Perish such avarice! Why, in the throes of such wretchedness, she ought to have comfort much rather than further trouble.” Another time he remitted £5 due from a knight’s son, at his father’s death, saying it was unjust and mischievous that he should lose his money because he had lost his father too. “He shall not have double misfortune at any rate at our hands.” Even in the twelfth century piety and business sometimes clashed.

Hugh had not been enthroned a year, when Christendom was aghast and alarmed at the news   from the East. Saladin with eighty thousand men had met the armies of the Cross at Tiberias (or Hittin), had slaughtered them around the Holy Rood itself, in the Saviour’s own country, had beheaded all the knights of the Temple and the Hospital who would not betray the faith. Jerusalem had fallen, and Mahomet was lord of the holy fields. “The rejoicing in hell was as great as the grief when Christ harrowed it,” men said. The news came in terrible bursts; not a country but lost its great ones. Hugh Beauchamp is killed, Roger Mowbray taken. The Pope, Urban III., has died of grief. The Crusade has begun to be preached. Gregory VIII. has offered great indulgences to true penitents and believers who will up and at the Saracens. He bade men fear lest Christians lose what land they have left. Fasting three days a week has been ordered. Prince Richard has the cross (and is one, to his father). Berter of Orleans sings a Jeremiad. Gilbert Foliot (foe to St. Thomas) is dead. Peace has been made between France of the red cross and England of the white, and Flanders of the green. King Henry has ordered a tax of a tenth, under pain of cursing, to be collected before the clergy in the parishes from all stay-at-homes. Our Hugh is not among the bishops present at this Le Mans proclamation. The kingdom is overrun, in patches, with tithe collectors. Awful letters come from Christian remnants, but still there is no crusade; France and England are at war. The new Pope is dead. Now old Frederick Barbarossa is really off to Armenia. Prayers and psalms for Jerusalem fill the air. The Emperor is drowned. Archbishop   Baldwin and Hugh of Durham, notwithstanding, quarrel with their monks. Scotland is always in a tangle. Great King Henry, with evil sons and failing health, makes a sad peace in a fearful storm, learns that son John too has betrayed him, curses his day and his sons, and refuses to withdraw his curse, dies at Chinon before the altar, houselled and anhealed, on the 6th of July, 1189. But when dead he is plundered of every rag and forsaken.