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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.