THE DISPUTE BETWEEN HAROLD AND GISA. 447 statement openly, and even meditated a sentence of excommunication CHAP. X. 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 we do not possess Gisa's own Harold's answer. But it is to be remarked that there is of the case. nothing in Gisa's version which at all touches any ancient possessions of the see. 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 Duduc 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 there may not have been something to say on the side of the Earl as well as on that of the Bishop. In any case, the simple statement of Gisa differs Exaggera widely from the exaggerations of later writers. In their later 1 This custom, if not universal, certainly prevailed in particular places. Among the customs of the town of Oxford (Domesday, 154 b) we read, "Si quis extraneus in Oxeneford manere deligens et domum habens sine parentibus ibi vitam finierat, Rex habebat quidquid reliquerit." "Extraneus" is not unlikely to mean a 'foreigner," in the sense of a nonburgher, but, if he were a non-Englishman, the case would be stronger still. Compare the French droit d'aubaine. tions of writers. CHAP. X. 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 hardly less criminal than one which is altogether fraudulent or violent. Later career of Gisa. Both our Lotharingian Bishops survived the Conquest; Walter and Gisa survived the Conqueror himself. There is nothing to convict either of them of treason to England; but Gisa at 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.2 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 but an end in which questions of and shameful end, Norman, English, and Lotharingian nationality were in no 1 See his language in pp. 18, 19 of his narrative. 2 Matth. Paris. Vitt. xxiii. Abb. ii. 47. 3 Will. Malms. Gest. Pont. Scrippt. p. Bed. 163. GISA'S CHANGES AT WELLS. 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.5 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. ... 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. 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. Compari son between 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 at Rome. April 15, 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 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. The news was brought to the King, seemingly while the Witan were, as usual, in session at Winchester. The royal choice fell on Ethelsige, a monk Æthelsige of the New Minster. He, we are told, followed Arch- the abbabishop Stigand, and was by him hallowed as Abbot on tial bene 1 See above, p. 444. 2 Fl. Wig. 1061; Vita Eadw. 411; Ethelred Riev. X Scriptt. 387. 5 W. Thorn. X Scriptt. 1785. Chron. Petrib. 1061. "And on þam sylfan geare for ferde Wulfric abbod æt See Augustine innon þære 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. "On the form of appointment see Appendix I. Abbot 1061. receives diction |