memorable happening, from the days of Æthelhelm the first Bishop, who
was appointed in 909, to those of Duduc, who was Bishop from 1033 to
1060.[18] Tombs bearing the names of several Bishops of those days
are still to be seen in the church. But they are all work of the
thirteenth century, and, if the names given to them are trustworthy,
Bishop Jocelin, when he rebuilt the church, must have made new tombs
for his predecessors, a thing which sometimes was done. But when
we get to Duduc, we are getting towards things which ought to be
remembered; we are getting to the actual local history of the church
of Wells itself, which hitherto it has been hard to distinguish from
the general history of the Church in England. Duduc was the first
Bishop who was not an Englishman; he was a Saxon. Of course there was a
sense in which the Bishops before him might be called Saxons, that is
West-Saxons, subjects of the King of the West-Saxons and probably in
most cases themselves of West-Saxon blood. But Duduc was a Saxon from
the Old-Saxon land in Germany, the old land of our fathers, and this is
always the meaning of the word Saxon in the history of those times.[19]
This Bishop Duduc was in high favour both with King Cnut and afterwards
with Eadward the Confessor. And his name at once brings us to a story
which connects our church of Wells with the greatest Englishman of
those days, though in a way which has brought undeserved obloquy on his
name. I dare say some of you have read the tale of Harold's plundering
the church of Wells, banishing the Bishop, bringing the Canons to
beggary, and what not. However, I will read you the story as it stands
in Collinson's "History of Somersetshire." He is speaking of the next
Bishop Gisa, of whom I shall say more presently.
"On his entry into his diocese, he found the estates of the church in
a sad condition; for Harold earl of Wessex, having with his father,
Godwin earl of Kent, been banished the kingdom, and deprived of all
his estates in this county by King Edward, _who bestowed them on the
church of Wells_, had in a piratical manner made a descent in these
parts, raised contributions among his former tenants, spoiled the
church of all its ornaments, driven away the canons, invaded their
possessions, and converted them to his own use. Bishop Giso in vain
expostulated with the King on this outrageous usage; but received from
the Queen, who was Harold's sister, the manors of Mark and Mudgley,
as a trifling compensation for the injuries which his bishoprick had
sustained. Shortly after [after 1060] _Harold was restored to King
Edward's favour, and made his captain-general_; upon which he in
his turn _procured the banishment of Giso_, and when he came to the
crown, resumed most of those estates of which he had been deprived.
_Bishop Giso continued in banishment till the death of Harold_, and
the advancement of the Conqueror to the throne, who in the second year
of his reign restored all Harold's estates to the church of Wells,
except some small parcels which had been conveyed to the monastery of
Gloucester; in lieu of which he gave the manor and advowson of Yatton,
and the manor of Winsham." ("History of Somersetshire," iii. 378.)
Now all this, as is commonly the case with what we read in county
histories and books of that class, is pure fiction, but it is very
curious and instructive to see how the fiction arose. We can trace
every step. Collinson improved on the account in Bishop Godwin's
Catalogue of Bishops, which was written in the time of Elizabeth.[20]
Godwin improved on the Latin history of Wells, written by a Canon of
Wells in the fifteenth century, which is one of our chief authorities
on all local matters.[21] The Canon of Wells, in his turn, improved
on the original account given by Bishop Gisa, the person concerned.
We have no account from Harold's side, but we have the contemporary
version from the other side, and it certainly differs not a little
from the version given by our worthy local antiquary. All about
Harold's estates being granted to the church of Wells, all about his
seizing the estates of the church, all about Gisa being banished
and the Canons being driven away, is all pure invention, which has
gradually grown up between Gisa's time and Collinson's. Gisa's own
account, which is printed in Hunter's Ecclesiastical Documents, is
to this effect.[22] King Cnut had given to Duduc the two lordships
of Banwell and Congresbury, not as a possession of his see, but as a
private estate. These lands, together with some ornaments and relics,
Duduc wished to leave to the see. But on his death Harold, the Earl
of the district, took possession of them. This is the whole of the
charge. Gisa does not accuse Harold of taking anything which had ever
belonged to the see, but only of hindering Duduc's will in favour of
the see from taking effect. We thus have Gisa's charge, but we have
not Harold's answer. That answer, I conceive, would have been that, as
Duduc was a foreigner dying without heirs, he had no power of making
a will, but that his property went to the King or to the Earl as his
representative. I cannot say for certain whether this would have been
good law everywhere, but it certainly would have been good law in some
places, and it at once suggests an intelligible explanation of Harold's
conduct. But churchmen in those days always held that the Church was
always to gain and never to lose, and we find other cases in which
laymen who prosecuted legal claims against ecclesiastical bodies are
called nearly as hard names as if they had robbed the Church by fraud
or violence.[23] Gisa does not say that he complained to the King or
attempted any legal prosecution of the matter; but he made private
appeals to Harold and threatened him with excommunication. You must
remember that all this concerns only the moveable goods and the lands
at Banwell and Congresbury, which, before Duduc's death, had never
belonged either to Harold or to the church of Wells. With Winesham
Harold had nothing to do; that lordship, Gisa says, was wrongly
detained from the see by a man named Ælfsige. Gisa was never banished,
and it so happens that the only writ of Harold's which we have is
one addressed to Gisa, assuring him of his friendship and confirming
him and his see in all their possessions.[24] Gisa himself adds that
Harold, after his election to the Crown, promised to restore the two
lordships and to make other gifts as well. This he was hindered from
doing by what Gisa calls God's judgement upon him, that is to say, by
the Conquest of England.[25]
Now this is a very remarkable story, as showing how tales grow, like
snowballs rolled along the ground, and how dangerous it is to take
things on trust from late and careless writers. You see at once how
utterly different Gisa's own account of his own doings is from that
in Collinson. The Canon of Wells and Bishop Godwin give the story in
intermediate forms. I should strongly recommend those who are able to
get at the books to compare all four accounts together. There cannot be
a better example of the growth of a legend.
This Bishop Gisa, who succeeded Duduc in the year 1060, was a
remarkable man in our local history. Like Duduc, he was a foreigner.
Like several other Bishops at that time, he came from Lotharingia or
Lorraine. But you must remember that the name Lorraine then meant, not
only Upper Lorraine which is now part of France, but Lower Lorraine,
a great part of which is now part of the Kingdom of Belgium. Gisa in
short was what we should now call a Belgian, and he probably spoke
the old tongue of those parts, which is one of the tongues of the
Continent which is most like our own. He complains that, when he came
to his diocese, he found his church mean and its revenues small; so
much so that the four or five canons who were there had to beg their
bread.[26] Of course I need not say that this is an exaggerated way
of talking; but we may well believe that, like many a poor clergyman
still, they were glad of any help that well-disposed people would give
them. It is worth notice that another Bishop of the same time and of
the same nation, Hermann, Bishop of the Wilsætas, complained that the
revenues of his church at Ramsbury were so small that they could not
maintain any monks or canons at all. Hermann mended matters in one
way by getting the Bishoprick of Dorsetshire or Sherborne joined to
that of Wiltshire and Berkshire, and in the end he moved his see to
Salisbury, that is of course Old Sarum, whence it was afterwards again
moved to the new city of that name.[27] Gisa set to work to increase
the revenues of his church by buying and begging in all directions.
King Eadward gave him Wedmore; his wife, the Lady Eadgyth--remember
that the proper title of the wife of a West-Saxon King was not Queen
but Lady--gave him Mark and Mudgeley; William the Conqueror gave him
the disputed lordships of Banwell and Winesham, and he bought Combe
and lands at Litton and Wormestor or Worminster.[28] He was thus able
to make a good provision for his canons; you will doubtless remember
that many of the places which I have just spoken of give their names to
prebends in the church of Wells to this day. He also greatly increased
the number of canons, but he did something more. Among the things which
he complains of is that the canons of Wells before his time had no
cloister or refectory. This means that they did not live in common,
but lived, after the manner of English secular priests, each man in
his own house. They therefore had no need of a common refectory or
dining-hall, nor had they any need of a cloister. In a monastery the
cloister is one of the most important parts of the building; it is
the centre of everything, all the other parts gathering round it;
and it is always built in one particular place and of one particular
shape, namely a square north or south of the nave of the church. In a
monastery in short the cloister is a necessity; in a secular church it
is a luxury, a thing which may be very well left alone. In our secular
churches therefore we sometimes find a cloister and sometimes not, and,
when there was one, it might be built of any shape and in any position
that might be thought good. But in Gisa's country of Lorraine the
secular canons were used to live in a much stricter way than they did
in England. They were not monks, because they did not take vows; but
they lived much more after the manner of monks, dwelling together with
a common refectory and a common dormitory or sleeping-room, and being
governed by very strict rules which had been drawn up by Chrodegang,
Bishop of Metz in Upper Lorraine.[29] You will see that the main
object of all this was to hinder them from marrying, which the English
secular priests, living each man in his own house, often did. Gisa's
great object was to bring this discipline, the discipline, as he says,
of his own country, into his church of Wells. This was what several
Bishops about the same time were doing elsewhere. About a hundred years
before Adalbero, Archbishop of Rheims, had done the same in his church,
the metropolitan church of France.[30] But Rheims, you may remark,
though in France and the head church of France, is quite near enough
to the borders of Lorraine to come within the reach of Lotharingian
influences. So in our own country, at this very time Leofric Bishop
of Exeter was introducing the same discipline into his church.[31] But
we find that Leofric, though by birth an Englishman, or perhaps rather
a Welshman of Cornwall, had been brought up in Lorraine. It is always
from Lorraine, in one shape or another, that this kind of change seems
to come. And we have quite enough to show that Englishmen did not like
it, as the changes which were brought in by Gisa and Leofric did not
last very long either at Wells or at Exeter. Gisa, however, carried
his point for the time. He built a cloister, a refectory, and whatever
other buildings were needed for his purpose, and made the Canons live
after the Lotharingian fashion. As their chief officer he appointed
one Isaac, one of their own body, and whom they themselves chose. He
was called the Provost, and his chief business was to look after the
temporal concerns of the church.
Now in this account there are many things worthy of careful notice.
First, mark the full authority of the Bishop in his own church; Gisa
seems to do whatever he pleases. We need not suppose that he did what
he did without obtaining the consent of his Chapter in some shape or
other; but it is plain that the Bishop was still, to say the least,
the chief mover in everything. One is also inclined to think that
before Gisa's time the Canons had no property distinct from that of the
Bishop. A large portion of his new acquisitions was bestowed to the
benefit of the Canons; but it appears from Domesday that what they held
at the time of the Survey was all held under the Bishop.[32] Secondly,
mark the very important change which Gisa made in the constitution
of the church of Wells by bringing in the Lotharingian discipline. He
did not, like some other Prelates, drive out his canons and put monks
in their stead, nor yet did he, as was done at some other places,
compel his canons to take monastic vows. The Canons of Wells, after
his changes, still remained secular priests and not regulars. But the
changes which he made were all in a monastic direction. They brought in
something of the strictness of monastic discipline among a body of men
who had hitherto lived in a very much freer way. I cannot help thinking
that the rule of Chrodegang was but the small end of the wedge, and
that before long it would, if not by Gisa, by some reforming Bishop or
other, have been developed into the rule of Saint Benedict. But the
next Bishop was not a reforming Bishop, and the fear of the Canons
of Wells being displaced to make room for monks, or being themselves
turned into monks, happily passed away. Gisa, there can be no doubt,
was a good man and a diligent and conscientious Bishop, though some of
his doings were such as we Englishmen are not likely to approve. At
last, after being Bishop twenty-eight years, he died in 1088, and was
buried under an arch in the wall on the north side of the high altar,
as his predecessor Duduc was on the south side.[33] This notice is
important; it shows that Gisa, among all his works of other kinds, did
not rebuild the church itself; it also shows, by speaking of an arch in
the wall, that the eastern part of the church had no aisles.
The next Bishop was quite another kind of man. I know not whether he
is reverenced at Bath, but we at Wells have certainly no reason to
love his memory. You will remember that, as Gisa was Bishop from 1060
to 1088, the Norman Conquest of England came in his time. One result
of that event was that all the Bishopricks and Abbeys of England were
gradually filled by strangers, and much greater strangers to England
than Duduc and Gisa had been. The new Bishops and Abbots, just as much
as the new Earls, were almost all Normans or Frenchmen, who, I suspect,
seldom learned to talk English. The first Bishop of Somersetshire
after the Conquest was John de Villulâ, a Frenchman from Tours, who
was appointed by William Rufus. About this time there was a great
movement, which had begun under Edward the Confessor and which went
on under William the Conqueror, for moving the sees or _bishopstools_
of Bishops from smaller towns to greater ones. Thus, in our own part
of England, Bishop Leofric, in King Edward's time, removed the united
see of Devonshire and Cornwall from Crediton to Exeter, and in King
William's time Bishop Hermann removed the united see of Dorsetshire
and Wiltshire from Ramsbury and Sherborne to Salisbury. By Salisbury
you will of course remember that I mean Old Sarum and not New. The
historian William of Malmesbury, who wrote under Henry the First, calls
this change the removal of Bishopricks from villages or small towns to
cities. And among the villages or small towns from which Bishopricks
were removed I am sorry to say that he reckons our city of Wells.[34]
For the first thing that the new Bishop John did was to remove his
bishopstool from the church of Saint Andrew at Wells to the church
of Saint Peter at Bath, on which William of Malmesbury remarks that
Andrew, although the elder brother, was obliged to give way to his
younger brother Simon.[35] Bath was then, as now, a much larger town
than Wells, and was a walled city, which Wells never has been. It was
an old Roman town, which had been taken by the West-Saxons in 577, a
good while before Somersetshire south of the Axe became English.[36]
The church of Saint Peter there was founded by Offa, King of the
Mercians, for secular canons, but King Eadgar had, as in so many other
churches, put monks instead, and Bath had ever since been a famous
monastery. So, if the Bishop's see is necessarily to be fixed in the
greatest town in the diocese, Bath was undoubtedly the right place, but
it had the disadvantage of being much less central than Wells, being,
as we all know, quite in a corner of the diocese. The Abbey of Bath was
just then vacant by the death of the Abbot Ælfsige, an Englishman who
had contrived to keep his office all through the reign of William the
Conqueror; so Bishop John persuaded King William Rufus to grant the
Abbey of Bath for the increase of the Bishoprick of Somersetshire.[37]
This was done by a charter in 1088, which was confirmed by two charters
of Henry the First in 1100 and 1111. In the next year the Bishop begged
or bought of the King the whole town of Bath, which had lately been
burned. The effect of these changes was that the Abbey of Bath was
merged in the Bishoprick. There was no longer a separate Abbot, but
the Bishop was Abbot; the church of Saint Peter became his cathedral
church, and its Prior and monks became his Chapter. The Bishop also,
by his grant or purchase from the King, became temporal lord of the
town. Bishop John, having thus got possession of Bath and all that
was in it, spiritual and temporal, reigned there at first somewhat
sternly. He was, as I have said, a foreigner; he was also a skilful
physician and fond of learned men of every kind. The monks of Bath,
no doubt mostly Englishmen, he despised as ignorant barbarians; so he
oppressed them and cut their living very short, till afterwards, we are
told, he repented, and gave them their possessions back again.[38] He
also rebuilt the church of Bath, now become his cathedral church, and
greatly enriched it with ornaments and the like, and then, after being
Bishop for thirty-six years, he died and was buried in 1124.
But it more concerns us to know what was going on at Wells all this
time. The see had been altogether taken away, so much so that one of
the charters of Henry the First speaks of the see of all Somersetshire
having been moved to Bath from the town which is called Wells. I
conceive that the Bishop of Bath now looked on Wells simply as one of
the lordships of the see, just like Banwell, Evercreech, Wookey, or
any other, where the Bishops had houses and where they occasionally
lived. So, among his other doings, Bishop John built himself a house
at Wells. But the way in which he found himself a site and materials
was a somewhat remarkable one. For it was by pulling down all the
buildings that Gisa had built for the use of the Canons, and building
his own house on the spot.[39] Now this shows that either the church
or the Bishop's Palace has changed its place since the time of John of
Tours. For we may be sure that Gisa built his cloister, refectory, and
dormitory close to the church, just as they would be in a monastery.
Therefore, if John built his house on their site, it must have been
much nearer to the church than the present palace is. Nothing is left
of either the church or the palace as they stood then, and it is
most likely that the site of the palace has been changed, and that
Gisa's canonical buildings and John's manor-house both stood where
the cloister, library, &c. stand now. But I thought it worth while
to mention this, because it was not very uncommon, when a church was
rebuilt, to build the new church a little way off from the old one.[40]
The reason for this was, that the service might go on in the old church
while the new one was building; and when the new church was finished,
the old one was pulled down and the new used instead. It is therefore
quite possible that our present cathedral does not stand quite on the
same site as the church which was standing in Gisa and John's time. But
on the whole the chances are the other way.
The Canons of Wells were thus turned out of the buildings which Gisa
had made for them, and were driven to live where they could in the
town.[41] The great and learned Bishop of Bath cared nothing about
them, or rather he made spoil of them in every way. A portion of
their estates, valued then at thirty pounds a year, was held by the
Bishop's steward, Hildebert by name, who seems also to have been his
brother and to have held the office of Provost of the Canons. On
Hildebert's death, the estate, by the Bishop's assent, passed as an
hereditary possession to his son John, who is described as Archdeacon
and Provost.[42] As I understand the matter, the estate became a kind
of impropriation; Hildebert, John, and their heirs held the estate, and
paid the Canons a fixed rent-charge. For though we read of the estate
being taken away from the Church, yet we also read incidentally that
Provost John paid each Canon sixty shillings yearly.[43] This would
seem to show that there were ten Canons, among whom the thirty pounds
had to be divided. But as we read that, when Bishop Robert recovered
the property, he paid each Canon a hundred shillings, it would seem
that the estate increased in value, but that John simply paid the
Canons their old stipends, taking to himself the surplus, which should
no doubt have been employed either in raising the stipends of the
existing Canons or else in increasing their number. This is the kind of
abuse which we constantly light upon in all manner of institutions, and
we see that at all events it is not a new abuse. Canons in their own
infancy were treated by Provosts much as Canons, in the days of their
greater developement, have in different places treated Minor Canons,
Singing Men, Grammar-Boys, and Poor Knights. The peculiar thing is that
the Provostship became hereditary, subject only to this fixed charge,
exactly like a lay rectory charged with a payment to the Vicar.
I think then that, however our Bath neighbours may look at him, we at
Wells have a right to set down Bishop John of Tours as the worst enemy
that our church had from the eighth century to the sixteenth. We
are told that he repented, but it must have been an ineffectual kind
of repentance, as he made no restitution.[44] Or we may say that his
repentance was geographical, for a deed is extant in which he restores
to the monks of Bath all that he had taken from them, but there is no
sign that he restored anything to the Canons of Wells.[45] Still his
doings had one effect; the Lotharingian discipline was broken up for
ever, and the secular priests of Wells were never again constrained
to sleep in a common dormitory or to dine in a common refectory. John
thus indirectly helped to put things on the footing which they assumed
under the next Bishop but one, and which, in its main features, has
been retained to this day. It is that Bishop, Robert by name, whose
episcopate forms the natural boundary of the first portion of my
subject. Hitherto I have had to deal with a church and a Chapter of
Wells; but hardly with the church and Chapter which at present exist.
I have had to speak of the early beginning of things, of fabrics and
institutions alike which were far from having reached their full
developement. With Robert a new era begins alike in architectural,
capitular, and municipal matters. He was a founder in every sense. He
rebuilt the fabrics of both his churches. He settled the relations
between those two churches as they remained till the suppression of
the monastery of Bath in the sixteenth century. He gave the Chapter
of Wells a new constitution, which, with some changes in detail, it
still retains. Last, but not least, he gave the first charter of
incorporation to the burghers who had gradually come to dwell under
the shadow of the minster. He may therefore be looked upon as the
founder of Wells, church and city alike, as they now stand. The reign
of this memorable Prelate therefore marks the first stage in my story;
I will therefore now bring my first lecture to an end, and will reserve
a detailed account of the important episcopate of Robert to form the
beginning of my account of the mediæval, as distinguished from the
early, history of the church of Wells.
LECTURE II.