GISA BISHOP OF SOMERSETSHIRE.

449

CHAP. X.

Gisa

Bishop of

Chaplain of the King. These appointments, taken in connexion with Harold's own appointment of Adelard in his College at Waltham, must be carefully noticed. The in- Wells. fluence of Harold, and with it the close connexion between England and Northern Germany, is now at its height.

1060-1088.

between

Gisa.

1061-1066.

From one however of the Prelates now appointed the great Earl hardly met with the gratitude which he deserved. The story is one of the best illustrations of the way in which stories grow. Duduc, the late Bishop of Dispute Wells, had received from King Cnut certain estates as his Harold and private property, among which, strangely enough, we find reckoned the Abbey of Gloucester. Duduc, with King Eadward's assent, is said to have made over these estates to his own church, besides various moveable treasures which he bequeathed on his death-bed. But on the death of Duduc, Earl Harold took possession of all. The new Bishop, looking on this as an injury done to his see, rebuked the Earl both privately and openly, and even meditated a sentence of excommunication against him. He never however ventured on this final step, and Harold, on his election to the Crown, promised both to restore the lands in question and to give others as well. The fulfilment of this promise was hindered by Harold's death, which of course the Bishop represents as a divine judgement. This is Gisa's story, and Gisa's own we do not possess Harold's defence. But it is to be remarked of the case. that there is nothing in Gisa's version which at all touches

1 Flor. Wig. 1060. His writ is given in Cod. Dipl. iv. 195. The local historian of Wells (Ang. Sac. i. 559), with the notions of the fifteenth century, makes Gisa receive his appointment, as well as his consecration, from the Pope; "Hic quum in quâdam ambassiatâ cum aliis à dicto Rege ad Apostolicam Sedem missus fuisset pro quibusdam negotiis conscientiam dicti Regis moventibus, Apostolicus sibi contulit sedem Wellensem." Gisa was born (see his own account, Ecclesiastical Documents, p. 16) at Saint Trudo, a town of the district of Hasbain in the Bishoprick of Lüttich. Florence says of Duduc and Gisa that they were "ambo de Lotharingiâ oriundi," but Duduc was certainly a Saxon.

2 On the dispute between Harold and Gisa, see Appendix FF. VOL. II.

G g

statement

CHAP X. any ancient possessions of the see of Wells. He speaks only of some private estates which Duduc gave, or wished to give, to his church. Gisa does not even charge Harold with seizing anything which had belonged to the see before Duduc's time; he simply hinders Duduc's gifts and bequests from taking effect. Gisa says nothing of any appeal to the King, but simply of an appeal made by himself to the private conscience of Harold. The natural inference is that Harold, as Earl of the country, asserted a legal claim to the lands and other property, that he disputed Duduc's right to dispose of them, and maintained that they fell to the King, or to the Earl as his representative. As Dudue was a foreigner, dying doubtless without heirs, it is highly probable that such would really be the law of the case. At all events, as we have no statement from the defendant and a very moderate one from the plaintiff, it is only fair to stop and think whether it is not possible that there may have been something to say on the side of the Earl as well as Exaggera on that of the Bishop. In any case, the simple statement of Gisa differs widely from the exaggerations of later writers. In their stories we hear how Harold, instead of simply hindering a new acquisition by the Church of Wells, plundered it of its old established possessions. While Earl, he drives the Canons away and reduces them to beggary. As King, he seizes all the estates of the see and drives the Bishop into banishment. All this, I need not say, is utterly inconsistent with Gisa's own narrative and with our other corroborative evidence. The story is an instructive one. By the colouring given to it by Gisa himself, and by the exaggerations which it received in later times, we may learn to look with a good deal of suspicion on all stories of the kind.. The principle is that the Church is in all cases to gain and never to lose; a regular and legal opposition to ecclesiastical claims is looked on as no less criminal than one which is altogether fraudulent or violent.

tions of

later writers.

GISA'S DISPUTE WITH HAROLD.

2

451

Later career of

Gisa.

Both our Lotharingian Bishops survived the Conquest; CHAP. X. Gisa survived the Conqueror himself. There is nothing to convict either of them of treason to England; but Gisa at Walter and least does not seem very warm in his patriotism for his adopted country. He is quite ready to forgive William for the Conquest of England in consideration of the help which he gave him in his reformation of the Church of Wells.' Walter, on the other hand, is represented, in some accounts, as taking a prominent part in resistance to the Conqueror. The tale rests on no good authority, but it could hardly have been told of one whose conduct was known to have been of a directly opposite kind. On the other hand, as both Walter and Gisa kept their sees till death, they must at least have shown a discreet amount of submission to the new state of things. Walter came, so we are told, to a sad and shameful end,3 but one in which questions of Norman, English, and Lotharingian nationality were in no way concerned. Gisa lived in honour, and died Gisa's changes at in the odour of sanctity, and he fills a prominent place in Wells. the history of the Church of Wells. He found his church, small, poor, served only by four or five Canons, who lived in houses in the town, and who, we are told, doubtless by a figure of speech, had sometimes to beg their bread.1 Gisa obtained various gifts from King Eadward and the Lady Eadgyth, and afterwards from William,5 and he was also enabled to buy several valuable possessions for his church. But he is most memorable for his attempt to

1 See his language in pp. 18, 19 of his narrative. 2 Matth. Paris. Vitt. xxiii. Abb. ii. 47.

3 Will. Malms. Gest. Pont. Scriptt. p. Bed. 163.

Hist. Ep. Som. 16-19. "Tunc ecclesiam sedis meæ perspiciens esse mediocrem, clericos quoque quatuor vel quinque absque claustro et refectorio esse ibidem. . . Quos publicè vivere et inhonestè mendicare necessariorum inopia antea coegerat." See Appendix FF.

6 Among other things, he bought Combe from "Arsere" (p. 18), who on reference to Domesday (89) appears as Azor, seemingly the same Thegn of whom Earl Godwine bought Woodchester in Gloucestershire. See

1059.

CHAP. X. introduce at Wells, as Leofric had done at Exeter,1 the rule of his countryman Chrodegang. Two synods held at Rome a few years earlier, one of them the second Lateran Council, had made various ordinances with the object of enforcing this rule, or one of the same character, on all cathedral and collegiate clergy. In obedience to their orders, Gisa began to reform his Church according to the Lotharingian pattern.2 The number of the Canons of Wells was increased, their revenues were increased also, but they were obliged to forsake their separate houses, and to use the common refectory and dormitory which Gisa built for them.3 This change was still more short-lived at Wells than it was at Exeter. Whatever Gisa did was undone by his immediate

Comparison be

tween the

foundations of Harold and Gisa.

successor.

It is to be noticed that the innovations of Leofric at Exeter and of Gisa at Wells were conceived in quite another spirit from Harold's foundation at Waltham. The changes made by the Lotharingian Bishops-for Leofric, though English by birth, was Lotharingian in feeling-were changes in a monastic direction. Leofric and Gisa did not indeed expel their secular Canons and substitute monks; neither did they, like Wulfstan at Gloucester, require their Canons to take monastic vows or subject them to the fulness of monastic discipline. A

Appendix E. Azor signs many charters, and in the Waltham document (Cod. Dipl. iv. 159) he appears as "Regis dapifer."

1 See above, p. 84.

2 On these synods, held April 13th and May 1st, 1059, see Stubbs, Mosheim, ii. 47.

3 We have seen that he found his Canons "absque claustro et refectorio," things with which they could perfectly well dispense. Then he goes on (p. 19), "Quos publice vivere . . . canonicali, ditatos, instruxi obedientiâ. Claustrum verò et refectorium et dormitorium illis præparavi, et omnia quæ ad hæc necessaria et competentia fore cognovi,ad modum patriæ meæ laudabiliter advocavi." On the Provostship of Wells, part of this institution, see Professor Stubbs in Gentleman's Magazine, November 1864, p. 624.

INNOVATIONS OF GISA AT WELLS.

455

Canon of Wells or Exeter could doubtless, unlike a monk, CHAP. X. resign his office, and thereby free himself from the special obligations which it involved. But, while he retained his office, he was obliged to live in what, as compared with the free life of the English secular priest, must have seemed a monastic fashion. One may suspect that the rule of Chrodegang was but the small end of the wedge, and that, if the system had taken root and flourished, the next step would have been to impose monastic vows and full monastic discipline upon the capitular clergy. All this was utterly alien to the feelings of Englishmen. Our countrymen were, only too often, ready to found monasteries and to become monks. But they required that the process should be open and above-board. The monk should be a monk and the secular should be a secular. The secular had no mind to be entrapped into becoming a sort of half monk, while still nominally retaining the secular character. Earl Harold better understood his countrymen. When he determined on founding, not a monastery but a secular college, he determined that it should be really secular. The Canons of Waltham therefore lived like Englishmen, each man in his own house on his own prebend, while the Canons of Wells and Exeter had to submit for a while to the foreign discipline of the common refectory and the common dormer.

Gisa con

The Lotharingian Prelates seem to have been among the Walter and great disseminators of that feeling about the uncanonical secrated at appointment of Stigand, which, as we have seen, had Rome. April 15, perhaps touched the mind even of Harold himself.1 It is 1061. therefore not wonderful that the scruple had touched the mind of Eadward, and that it was by his authority that the two new Bishops went to Rome to receive consecration at the hands of the lawful Pope Nicolas.2 They refused

1 See above, p. 446.

2 Fl. Wig. 1061. Vita Eadw. 411. Ethelred Riev. X Scriptt. 387.