GISA'S CHANGES AT WELLS.

4

449

changes at

way concerned. Gisa lived in honour and died in the CHAP. X. odour of sanctity, and he fills a prominent place in the Gisa's history of the Church of Wells. He found his church Wells. small, poor, served only by four or five Canons, who lived in houses in the town, and who, it is said, 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,2 and he was also enabled to buy several valuable possessions for his church.3 But he is most memorable for his attempt to introduce at Wells, as Leofric had done at Exeter, 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 kind, on all cathedral and collegiate clergy. In obedience to their orders, Gisa began to reform his church according to the Lotharingian pattern. 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. This

1 Hist. Ep. Som. 16-19. "Tunc ecclesiam sedis meæ perspiciens esse mediocrem, clericos quoque quatuor vel quinque absque claustro et refectorio esse ibidem. . . quos publice vivere et inhoneste mendicare necessariorum inopia antea coegerat." 2 See Appendix QQ.

3 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 Appendix E; and on Azor, Appendix QQ. See above, p. 84.

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

We have seen that he found his Canons "absque claustro et refectorio," things which they could perfectly well do without. Then he goes on (p. 19), "Quos publice vivere . . canonicali, ditatos, instruxi obedientiâ. Claustrum vero 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.

1059.

CHAP. X. change was still more short-lived at Wells than it was at Exeter. Whatever Gisa did was undone by his immediate successor.

Comparison be

tween the

foundations of Harold and Gisa.

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 drive out their secular Canons and put monks in their stead; neither did they, like Wulfstan at Gloucester, call on their Canons to take monastic vows or bring them under the fulness of monastic discipline. A Canon of Wells or Exeter could doubtless, unlike a monk, 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 all 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 aboveboard. 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

DISTINCTION BETWEEN MONKS AND CANONS.

451

in his own house on his own prebend, while the Canons of CHAP. X. Wells and Exeter had to submit for a while to the foreign discipline of the common refectory and the common dormer.

3

Gisa con

The Lotharingian Prelates seem to have been among the Walter and great disseminators of that feeling about the uncanonical secrated appointment of Stigand, which, as we have seen, had at Rome. April 15, perhaps touched the mind even of Harold himself.1 It 1061. is 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 to receive the rite from a Primate whose pallium had been received from an usurper, and, as Ealdred had as yet received no pallium at all, there was no other Metropolitan in the land to fall back upon. The scruple however was not universal. Another great ecclesiastical preferment fell vacant during the absence of Walter and Gisa. Wulfric, Abbot of Saint Augustine's at Canterbury, Death of one of the Prelates who had appeared as the representatives Wulfric. of England at the Synod of Rheims, and who had been April 18, a splendid benefactor to his own monastery,5 died during the Easter festival.6 The news was brought to the King, seemingly while the Witan were, as usual, in session at Winchester. The royal choice fell on Æthelsige, a monk Æthelsige of the New Minster. He, we are told, followed Archbishop Stigand, and was by him hallowed as Abbot on

1 See above, p. 444.

4

2 Fl. Wig. 1061; Vita Eadw. 411; Ethelred Riev. X Scriptt. 387. 3 See Appendix CC.

5 W. Thorn. X Scriptt. 1785.

See above, p. III.

6 Chron. Petrib. 1061. And on þam sylfan geare forferde Wulfric abbod æt Sĉe Augustine innon pære Easter wucan on xiv. Kal. Mai." It is remarkable how many eminent persons-Earl Godwine, Archbishop Cynesige, and King Eadward himself are the most remarkable-died while the Witan were actually sitting, to the great convenience of those who had to elect their successors.

7 On the form of appointment see Appendix I.

Abbot

1061.

receives

the abbatial benediction

from Stigand. May 26, 1061.

CHAP. X. the day of the patron of his house. The ceremony was performed at Windsor, a royal seat of which this is one of our earliest notices.1 It would perhaps have been a strong measure for Ethelsige altogether to refuse the ministrations of one who was doubly his diocesan, alike as a monk of New Minster and as Abbot of Saint Augustine's. Moreover, the benediction of an Abbot was not a matter of the same spiritual importance as the consecration of a Bishop. It was an edifying ceremony, but it was not a sacramental rite. Still, when we remember that Earl Harold himself had chosen another Prelate for his ceremony at Waltham, it shows some independence on the part of Æthelsige thus openly to communicate with the schismatical Primate. His conduct at all events did not lose him the royal favour. At some date between this time and the death of Eadward, Abbot Elfwine of Ramsey, he who had been ambassador to the Pope and the Cæsar, resigned his office, and Abbot Æthelsige, without resigning his office at Canterbury, was entrusted with the administration of the great Huntingdonshire monastery.3

Journey to
Rome of
Ealdred,

1061.

It is not quite clear whether Gisa and Walter made their journey to Rome in company with some still more Tostig, and exalted personages who went on the same road in the Gyrth. course of the same year. The new Metropolitan of the North went to Rome after his pallium, and with him the Earl of the Northumbrians went as a pilgrim, accompanied by his wife, by his younger brother Gyrth, Earl of the East Angles, by several noble Thegns from Northhumberland, and by Burhhard, son of Earl Elfgar, a com

1 On Windsor see Cod. Dipl. iv. 178, 209, 227, and Domesday, 56 b.

2 See above, pp. III, 371.

3 Hist. Rams. c. 119.

Chron. Wig. 1061.

We shall hear of Æthelsige again.

"Her for Ealdred biscop to Rome æfter his

pallium."

EALDRED, TOSTIG, AND GYRTH AT ROME.

453

panion, it would seem, of Ealdred rather than of Tostig.1 CHAP. X. Harold, on his pilgrimage, had chosen the route through Gaul, in order to ascertain the strength of the enemy. Tostig, probably starting from the court of his brotherin-law at Bruges, chose to make his journey wholly through those kindred lands with which England was now so closely connected. The Archbishop and the two Earls passed through Saxony and along the upper course of the Rhine, so that, till they reached the Alps, the whole of their course lay over Teutonic soil. They seem to have found Gisa and Walter already at Rome; but the three Prelates, besides the personal business which each had with the Pope, are said to have been charged in common with one errand from the King. This was to obtain the Papal confirmation for the privileges of his restored monastery at Westminster. A synod of some kind was sitting, in which the Earl of the Northumbrians was received by Pope Nicolas with marked honours." The

4

1 The Worcester Chronicle merely says, "And se Eorl Tostig and his wif eac foron to Rome." The Biographer (410, 411) adds Gyrth, Gospatric, and others, as their companions. On Burhhard, son of Elfgar, see Appendix II.

66

2 Vita Eadw. 410. fines Romam tetendit."

Transfretavit, et per Saxoniam et superiores Rheni

3 Ib. 411. "Venerant quoque ex præcepto Regis... Gyso et Walterius." Æthel. Riev. 386; Est. de Seint Edward, 2324 et seqq. But the fact rests on better authority. The Biographer (411) speaks of Ealdred as going to Rome-"ut ibi scilicet et regiæ legationis caussam peroraret, et usum pallii obtineret." So Gisa himself (Hist. Ep. Som. 16) says that he came back “privilegium apostolicæ auctoritatis mecum deferens.”

5 Vita Eadw. 410. "Romæ ab Apostolico Nicolao, honore quo decebat susceptus, a latere ejus in ipsâ Romanâ synodo ab eo coactus sedit secundus." So Gisa (u. s.) says "post peractam ibi synodum." William of Malmesbury (Gest. Pont. 154) calls it "synodus quam contra simoniacos coegerat [Nicolaus]." He also mentions the honours shown to Tostig. But this synod cannot have been, as Æthelred (387) makes it, the Second Lateran Council. That assembly, according to the Chronicle of Bernold of Constanz (Pertz, v. 427), was held in 1060, but the real date was April 13, 1059. See its Acts in Pertz, Legg. ii. Ap. 177; Milman, iii. 49. And cf. above, p. 449.