Part 2 (1/2)

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' pa.s.sions, 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 Ma.s.s. 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 lords.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sistants troubling them would reproach them terribly, sometimes even thras.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sionately fond of children, not only because they were innocent, but because they were young: and he loved to romp with them--antic.i.p.ating 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 t.i.ts 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 un.o.bserved 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sages 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 G.o.dfrey; for the mere resonance of these blows it seems, is too much for the tender nerves of our generation. Another b.u.mpkin 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 G.o.d'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 h.e.l.l 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 t.i.the 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.

That last Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity, Hugh had been abroad with the poor king, and had been the only bishop who insisted upon keeping his festivals with full sung Ma.s.s and not a hasty, low Ma.s.s.

Hugh de Nonant, the new bishop of Coventry, one Confessor's Day had begun saying the introit, when his Lincoln namesake lifted up his voice and began the long melic intonation. ”No, no, we must haste. The king has told us to come quickly,” said the former. The answer was, ”Nay, for the sake of the King of kings, who is most powerfully to be served, and whose service must bate nothing for worldly cares, we must not haste but feast on this feast,” and so he came later, but missed nothing. Before the king died Hugh had gone back to his diocese again, and heard the sorrowful news there.

FOOTNOTES:

{3} The white.

{4} He was acting by a Canon of 1138, pa.s.sed at Westminster.

{5} Thornholm is near Appleby, and is a wooded part of the county even to this day.

{6} From this and from various incidental remarks it may be concluded that Hugh knew Hebrew, which is not remarkable, because the learned just then had taken vigorously to that tongue and had to be restrained from taking lessons too ardently in the Ghetto. Some of his incidental remarks certainly did not come from St. Jerome, the great cistern of mediaeval Hebrew.

CHAPTER V

THE BISHOP AT WORK

Henry was dead before his friend was three years a bishop, and with him died Hugh's hopes of better men on the bench, for Richard's bishops were treasurers, justiciars and everything but fathers of their dioceses.

Tall, blue-eyed, golden-haired Richard the Viking, had a simple view of his father's Empire. It was a fine basis for military operations.{7} He loosed some of the people's burdens to make them pay more groats. He unlocked the gaols. He made concessions to France and Scotland. He frowned upon the Jews, a frown which only meant that he was going to squeeze them, but which his people interpreted into a permission to wreak their hatred, malice, and revenge upon the favoured usurers.

The ma.s.sacre of Jews which began in London and finally culminated in the fearful scenes of York, spread to other parts and broke out in place after place. In Lent (1190) the enlisting for the crusade was going on in Stamford. The recruits, ”indignant that the enemies of the Cross of Christ who lived there should possess so much, while they themselves had so little for the expenses of so great a journey,” rushed upon the Jews. The men of Stamford tried to stop the riot, but were overcome, and if it had not been for the Castle the Jews would have been killed to a man. Two of the plunderers fell out over the booty. One, John by name, was killed, martyred it was supposed. The old women had dreams about him. Miracles began. A shrine was set up and robber John began to develop into Saint John. Then down came the bishop, scattered the watchers and wors.h.i.+ppers, hacked down the shrine and forbade any more such adoration of Jew-baiting thieves, with a thundering anathema. The Lincoln people next began the same game, but they did not reckon with the new warden, Gerard de Camville, who had bought the revenues and provided a harbour there for the Israelites. We may believe that the bishop also was not behind hand in quelling such b.l.o.o.d.y ruffianism, for the Jews were afterwards very conspicuous in their grief at his death, evidently owing him something.

King Richard, athirst for adventure, sold all that he could, taxed all that he could, and then set off for the crusade, carrying with him Baldwin the gentle archbishop, who was to die in despair at the gross habits and loose morals of the crusading hosts. He left behind him brother John, whom he had tried to bribe into fidelity, and a little lame, black foreigner, Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, who had been adviser, schemer, general brain box and jackal to the Lionheart, and who now swept through England with a thousand knights, trying cleverly and faithfully to rule the restive English and to keep them in some order and loyalty, in his ill-bred, active way. But the whole position was impossible and more impossible, first, because of John the always treasonable; and secondly, because of Walter, late Bishop of Lincoln and now of Rouen (the Pilate or Pilot?) whom Richard sent to guard the guardian. Geoffrey, half brother to the king, next came upon the scenes as a new complication. He had been made Archbishop of York and overlord of Durham. Black William's sister Richenda seized this archbishop and imprisoned him: and then Hugh joined the anti-Longchamp party, sided actively with John and with Gerard de Camville, who was beseiged in Lincoln. Hugh excommunicated Richenda. His influence turned the scale against Longchamp.

It would require a treatise in itself to unfold all the tangled story of the first half of Richard's reign till the king returned to England after war, prison, and heavy ransom, in March 1194. Practically, at this date the Bishop of Lincoln disappears as much as possible from political life; or at least tried to do so. He was building the cathedral and doing his duty as bishop, befriending the needy and the outcast, and showing himself the enemy of wrong-doers. Now we hear of him clipping the love locks of his young sacristan Martin, who straightway became a monk; now following in the steps of great St. Martin by some pa.s.sionate acts of pity, and now retiring mostly in harvest time (when all hands are busy and all hearts are out of reach) to his beloved Witham for a month's retreat.

Of course all devout people in the Middle Ages had an especial care for lepers because of that most fortunate mistranslation in Isaiah liii. 4.

which we render ”we did esteem Him stricken,” but which the Vulgate renders _putavimus eum quasi leprosum_: we did esteem Him as it were a leper. Hence service to lepers was especially part of service to Christ.

At Maiden Bradley, in Somerset, was a colony of leprous sisters; and at Witham Church a leper window looked towards their house. At Lincoln{8} was the Hospital of the Holy Innocents called La Malandrie. It was founded by St. Remigius, the Norman cathedral builder, with thirteen marks revenue and further endowed by Henry I. and Henry II. The condition of all these leper outcasts was more than miserable. The disease was divided into the breeding, full and s.h.i.+pwreck periods. When the first was detected the patient was led to church, clothed in black, Ma.s.s and Matins for the dead were said over him, earth was thrown upon his foot, and then he was taken to a hovel on waste land where he was to be buried at the last. Here he found a parti-coloured robe, a coat, two s.h.i.+rts, a rattle, knife, staff, copper girdle, bed, table, and lamp, a chair, chest, pail, cask and funnel, and this was his portion for ever.

He was not before 1179 allowed even a leprous priest to say Ma.s.s for him. The disease rotted away his flesh till he died, limbless or faceless in fearful s.h.i.+pwreck, and unhouselled. These wretches this bishop took under his peculiar care. He would wash them with his own hands, as his mother did before him, kiss them, serve them with meat, drink, and money. He would have thirteen together in his room, if he could find that number. He maintained many, both men and women. He would go to the Malandry, stop in a cell there, accompanied by a few of his devoutest and closest friends, and cosset the lepers motheringly, telling them they were desolate and afflicted only to be rewarded for ever, persuading them to a holy life with his pitying words, reproving them for their evil deeds (and many lepers were horribly immoral); but before ever he talked to them he kissed the men, embracing longer and more lovingly those who were worst smitten. The swelled, black, gathered, deformed faces, eyeless or lipless, were a horror to behold, but to Hugh they seemed lovely, in the body of their humiliation. Such he said were happy, were Paradise flowers, great crown gems of the King Eternal. He would use these as a text and speak of Christ's compa.s.sion to the wretched, Christ who now took ulcerous Lazarus by angels to Abraham's bosom and now became weak with our weakness. ”Oh, how happy they were who were close about that so sweet man as his friends!

Whatever his foot trod upon, or any part of him had touched, or his hands had handled, it would be sweet indeed to me, to devour with kisses, to put to my eyes, to bury in my very heart if I could. What of this superfluous humour, if one may use the word of what flowed from the tree of life? What am I to feel of that humour which used to be poured from a vase of such blessing because He bare our infirmity? Why, of course, if I only could, I should diligently gather Him, yes, and drain Him with my lips, drink Him in with my jaws, and hide just Him in my inward parts. Those are the really wretched, who fear aught else than to offend One so sweet. Those are the pitiful who esteem aught else sweet, or seek aught else than sweetly to cleave to this sweet One and sweetly obey Him. I do not know what he can feel to be bitter, who with the inner palate of the heart has learnt by continuous meditation to feed on the sweetness of this Sweet.” Thus inspired, he looked upon the weaker limbs of Christ, honouring those whom others pa.s.sed by.