--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 revelations{18} 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."
These stories seem to dissociate Hugh from the grosser forms of
Eucharistic teaching, and open the way for an explanation of his
behaviour at Féchamp, which is otherwise almost inexplicable. We may
take it that he held a belief in a living Presence, which teeth could
not bruise nor change decay. The language he uses is not consistent with
later English teaching which shrinks from talking about a repeated
sacrifice. It is also inconsistent with later Roman devotion, because he
seems to dislike the notion of a conditioned or corporal Presence, and
anyhow to shrink from the definite statements to which the Roman Church
has since committed herself. He certainly did not fix the Coming of the
Bridegroom at the Consecration Prayer, _a fortiori_ to any one
particular word of it.
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.
FOOTNOTES:
{15} lxviii. 35. A psalm full of associations of battles long ago: sung
against Julian the Apostate, used by Charlemagne, Anthony, Dunstan, and
many more.
{16} Simon of Pershore, if in 1198: and Robert of Caen, if in 1196, but
less likely.
{17} The Wycombe Well is probably the Round Basin, near the Roman Villa,
but the other I am unable to hear news of.
{18} Published by Arber. See chap. xxxvi.
{19} Joi.