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BISHOP HUGH OF LINCOLN

CANONIZED

“Hugh of Lincoln” is a title which, like Cerberus in Sheridan’s play, indicates “three gentlemen at once,” and it will perhaps prevent confusion if I briefly distinguish the three.

The first and greatest is the Burgundian, usually called from his birthplace on the frontier of Savoy “Hugh of Avalon.” He went to a good school in Grenoble, and, as a youth, joined the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, where he rose to be procurator or bursar. In 1175, at the request of Henry II. who had, with difficulty, obtained the consent of the Archbishop of Grenoble, he came to England to become the first prior of the king’s new monastery at Witham in Somerset, the first Carthusian house in England. In 1186, much against his will, he was, by the king’s decree, elected Bishop of Lincoln, and took up his residence at Stow, where he at once set to work to master the English tongue. His rule of life was ascetic, and he made a practice of going every year in harvest time to live as a simple monk at Witham. He was a strong man, with high ideals, upright, unselfish and charitable, no believer in the miracles of the day, and so free from prejudice that he always protected the hated Jews, who wept sincere tears at his funeral. He was active in his huge diocese, and was a maker of history, for, besides extending and beautifying the cathedral of Remigius, he eventually became so powerful that he joined the Archbishops in excommunicating their Sovereign, and in 1197 he successfully opposed King Richard I. and his “Justiciar,” who was the great Archbishop Hubert Walter. Walter, when Bishop of Salisbury, had accompanied Richard to the crusade, where he was the king’s chief agent in negotiating with Saladin. He headed the first party of pilgrims whom the Turks admitted to the Holy Sepulchre, led back the English host from Palestine in the king’s absence to Sicily, whence he went to visit Richard in captivity, and repaired to England to raise the £100,000 demanded for his ransom. He was made by the king’s command Archbishop of Canterbury, crowned the king a second time in 1194 at Winchester, and as “Justiciar” had the task of finding means to supply Richard’s ceaseless demands for money for his wars. Hence it was that he had summoned a meeting of bishops and barons at Oxford on December 7, 1197, at which he proposed that they should agree to the king’s latest demand and should themselves furnish him with three hundred knights to serve for twelve months against Philip of France, or give him money which would suffice to obtain them. This was strenuously and successfully opposed by Hugh, seconded by Herbert Bishop of Salisbury, and this action is spoken of by Stubbs as a landmark of constitutional history, being “the first clear case of the refusal of a money grant demanded by the Crown.” Hugh was in France when Henry II. died, but returned in time for the coronation of Richard I. He several times attended both Richard and John to Normandy, and when Richard died he buried him at Fontevrault in 1199, where Henry II. and his wife, Eleanora of Guienne, and John’s wife, Isabella of Angoulême, are also buried. He was back in England for John’s coronation on May 27, but, going again to visit the haunts of his boyhood at Grenoble, he caught a fever and, after a long illness, died next year in the London house of the Bishops of Lincoln, at the “Old Temple.” He was buried in his own cathedral, November 24, 1200, in the north-east transept, King John, who happened to be then in Lincoln, to receive the homage of the Scottish king, taking part as bearer in the funeral procession. Worship of him began at once, and was greatly augmented when the Pope canonized him in 1220. In 1230, when Richard of Gravesend had completed the angel choir, St. Hugh’s body was translated to it in the presence of King Edward I and Queen Eleanor and their children. This was ten years before Eleanor’s death at Harby, near Lincoln. The only thing recorded against Bishop Hugh is that he should have, upon Henry’s death, ordered the taking up of Fair Rosamond’s bones from Godstow Priory.

The story of St. Hugh’s swan is curious but not incredible. Sir Charles Anderson says: “It seems, from the minute description of the bill, to have been a wild swan or whooper.” This swan was greatly attached to its master, and constantly attended him when in residence at Stow Park, where there was a good deal of water, and many wildfowl. It is said, also, that on his last visit the bird showed signs of restlessness and distress. Sir Charles sees no reason to withhold belief from the story, and instances the case of a gander, within his own knowledge, which attached itself to a farmer in the county, and used to accompany him daily for a mile and a half, when he went to look after his cattle in the meadows, waddling after him with the greatest diligence and satisfaction; and, whenever he stopped, fondling his legs with neck and bill.

The “Magna Vita S. Hugonis” in the Bodleian, written by Adam, Abbot of Evesham soon after his death, is the chief source of our information about him; and a metrical life, also, in Latin, is both in the Bodleian and in the British Museum.

BISHOP HUGH OF WELLS

Nine years after St. Hugh’s death, Hugh the Second, or “Hugh of Wells,” was appointed bishop. He carried out the plans of his namesake, and completed the aisles and transepts and added the nave-chapels at the west end with their circular windows. He added to the episcopal palace begun by St. Hugh, and built that at Buckden—a fine brick building which later became the sole palace. The Bishops of Lincoln had a visitation palace at Lyddington, near Rockingham, in which a singularly beautiful carved wood frieze ran all round the large room. In the “Metrical Life of St. Hugh” we read that what St. Hugh planned, but left unfinished, Hugh of Wells completed.

“Perficietur opus primi sub Hugone secundo.”

LITTLE ST. HUGH

He died in 1235, and is buried in the north choir aisle. His extremely harsh treatment of the Jews leads us to the curiously tragic events in the life of the third Hugh, called the “Little St. Hugh.” He was born in 1246, and only lived nine years. That great man Grosteste, or Grostête, had succeeded Hugh of Wells, and died after an active episcopate of eighteen years, in 1254. His successor, Henry Lexington, had procured leave to extend the cathedral close beyond the Roman city wall in order to build the beautiful presbytery or angel choir for the shrine of Hugh I. He was still engaged on this when the persecution which the Jews had long endured produced such a bitter feeling that they were believed to be capable of kidnapping and crucifying, or by less conspicuous methods, putting to death a Christian boy when they had a chance. Hugh was said to be a chorister who disappeared, and his mother, led by a dream, discovered his body in a well outside the Newport Gate. A Jew called Jopin, or Chopin, but in a French ballad Peitevin, was accused of his murder, and is said to have confessed and to have been put to death with others of his nation with no small barbarity. He has left his memory at Lincoln in the name of “The Jews’ House,” which is given to the Norman building on the steep hill. This story was not uncommon, and told with much detail, as having really happened, in several places; nor is the belief in it yet dead. The boy’s body was given to the canons of the cathedral, who buried him with much solemnity in the south aisle of the choir, and set a small shrine over him, to which folk came to worship, and he received the title of “the Little St. Hugh.”

St. Mary’s Guild, Lincoln.

THE JEWS

This story is referred to by Chaucer, who wrote a hundred years later in “The Prioress’ Tale”:—

“O younge Hew of Lincoln sleyn also

With cursed Jewes, as it is notable,

For it nis but a litel whyle ago.”

His story makes the murdered boy reveal himself by singing “O alma Redemptoris Mater” “loude and clere,” although, as he says—

“My throte is cut unto my nekke-bon.”

and he does not stop singing till a ‘greyn’ is taken from his tongue by the abbot

“and he yaf up the goost ful softely.”

Marlowe has a similar story in his “Jew of Malta,” and ballads constantly were made on this theme. Sir Charles Anderson quotes one beginning:—

“The bonny boys of merry Lincoln

Were playing at the ball,

And with them stood the sweet Sir Hugh,

The flower of them all.

Whom cursed Jews did crucify,” &c.

He was buried, in 1255, next to Bishop Grosteste, who had died two years before.

The persistence of this medieval accusation against the Jews is singularly illustrated by a case which is reported in the papers of October 9, 1913, headed “Ritual Murder Trial.” The trial is at Kieff in Russia, of a perfectly innocent man called Beiliss, who has been more than two years in prison without knowing the reason, and is charged with the murder of a Christian boy called Yushinsky “to obtain blood for Jewish sacrificial rites.” The Times says that ritual murder is not now mentioned in the indictment. But that so monstrous a charge should be even hinted at shows how deeply these old malignant calumnies sank into the medieval mind, and how prone to superstition and how ready to believe evil we are even in the twentieth century of the Christian era. The whole idea is on a par with the abominable cruelties of the days when defenceless old women were burnt as witches, and is a cruel and absolutely baseless calumny on a long-suffering and law-abiding people, and yet there are plenty of people to-day in Russia who firmly believe in it.