Page images
PDF
EPUB

DISPUTE BETWEEN HAROLD AND GISA.

299

connexion between England and Northern Germany, is now at its height.

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.1 Duduc, the late Bishop of the Sumorsætas, had received from King Cnut certain estates as his private property, among which, strangely enough, we find reckoned the Abbey of Gloucester. Duduc is said to have made over these estates to his own church, and it is further said that the grant was made with the assent of King Eadward. Besides the lands, he had various moveable treasures which also he bequeathed to his church on his death-bed. But on the death of Duduc, Earl Harold took possession of all. The new Bishop, looking on this as a wrong 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 we do not possess Harold's answer. But it is to be remarked that there is 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 widely from the exaggerations of later

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

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 hardly less criminal than one which is altogether fraudulent or violent.

Both our Lotharingian Bishops survived the Conquest; 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.1 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 and shameful end, but an end in which questions of Norman, English, and Lotharingian nationality were in no way concerned. Gisa lived in honour and died in the odour of sanctity, and he fills a prominent place in 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, it is said, doubtless by a figure of speech, had sometimes to beg their bread. 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 introduce at

3

See his language in pp. 18, 19 of his necessariorum inopia antea coegerat." narrative. 5 See Appendix QQ.

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 publice vivere et inhoneste mendicare

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 Appendix E; and on Azor, Appendix QQ.

DISTINCTION BETWEEN MONKS AND CANONS.

301

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 (1059), 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.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. This change was still more short-lived at Wells than it was at Exeter. Whatever Gisa did was undone by his immediate

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 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 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

1 See above, p. 55.

2 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 obe

dientiâ. 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.

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.

The Lotharingian Prelates seem to have been among the great disseminators of that feeling about the uncanonical appointment of Stigand, which, as we have seen, had perhaps touched the mind even of Harold himself.1 It 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 Nicolas2 (April 15, 1061). 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.3 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, one of the Prelates who had appeared as the representatives of England at the Synod of Rheims, and who had been a splendid benefactor to his own monastery, died during the Easter festival (April 18). 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 of the New Minster. He, we are told, followed Archbishop Stigand, and was by him hallowed as Abbot on the day of the patron of his house (May 26). The ceremony was performed at Windsor, a royal seat of which this is one of our earliest notices.8 It would perhaps have been a strong measure for Æthelsige 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

1 See above, p. 297.

many eminent persons-Earl Godwine,

2 Fl. Wig. 1061; Vita Eadw. 411; Archbishop Cynesige, and King Eadward Æthelred Riev. X Scriptt. 387.

[blocks in formation]

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.

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

EALDRED, TOSTIG, AND GYRTH AT ROME.

303

date between this time and the death of Eadward, Abbot Elfwine of Ramsey, he who had been ambassador to the Pope and the Cæsar,1 resigned his office, and Abbot Æthelsige, without fesigning his office at Canterbury, was entrusted with the administration of the great Huntingdonshire monastery.2

4

It is not quite clear whether Gisa and Walter made their journey to Rome in company with some still more exalted personages who went on the same road in the course of the same year. The new Metropolitan of the North went to Rome after his pallium,3 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 Northumberland, and by Burhhard, son of Earl Ælfgar, a companion, it would seem, of Ealdred rather than of Tostig. 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 brother-in-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 illustrious visitors obtained the

1 See above, pp. 73, 248.

6

(411) speaks of Ealdred as going to

2 Hist. Rams. c. 119. We shall hear of Rome-" ut ibi scilicet et regiæ legationis Æthelsige again.

3 Chron. Wig. 1061. "Her for Ealdred biscop to Rome after his pallium."

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 Ælfgar, see Appendix II.

5 Vita Eadw. 410. "Transfretavit, et per Saxoniam et superiores Rheni fines Romam tetendit."

6 Ib. 411. "Venerant quoque ex præcepto Regis Gyso et Walterius."

7 Æthel. Riev. 386; Est. de Seint Edward, 2324 et seqq. But the fact rests on better authority. The Biographer

caussam peroraret, et usum pallii obtineret." So Gisa himself (Hist. Ep. Som. 16) says that he came back "privilegium apostolicæ auctoritatis mecum deferens."

8 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),

« PreviousContinue »