The most frightful excesses are said to have been committed by this potent earl. He sent spies, we are told, to beg from door to door, and discover where rich men dwelt, that he might seize them at night in their beds, throw them into dungeons, and compel the payment of a heavy ransom for their liberty.[491] He got by water to Ramsey, and entering the abbey of St. Benedict at morning’s dawn, surprised the monks asleep in their beds after the fatigue of nocturnal offices; he turned them out of their cells, filled the abbey with his soldiers, and made a fort of the church; he took away all the gold and silver vessels of the altar, the copes and vestments of the priests and singers ornamented with precious stones, and all the decorations of the church, and sold them for money to reward his soldiers.[492] The monkish historians of the period speak with horror of these sacrilegious excesses.
“He dared,” says William, the monk of Newburgh, who lived in the reign of king Stephen, “to make that celebrated and holy place a robber’s cave, and to turn the sanctuary of the Lord into an abode of the devil. He infested all the neighbouring provinces with frequent incursions, and at length, emboldened by constant success, he alarmed and harassed king Stephen himself by his daring attacks. He thus, indeed, raged madly, and it seemed as if the Lord slept and cared no longer for human affairs, or rather his own, that is to say, ecclesiastical affairs, so that the pious labourers in Christ’s vineyard exclaimed, ‘Arise, O God, maintain thine own cause ... how long shall the adversary do this dishonour, how long shall the enemy blaspheme thy name?’ But God, willing to make his power known, as the apostle saith, endured with much ‘long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction,’ and at last smote his enemies in their hinder parts. It was discovered indeed, a short time before the destruction of this impious man, as we have learned from the true relation of many witnesses, that the walls of the church sweated pure blood,—a terrible manifestation, as it afterwards appeared, of the enormity of the crime, and of the speedy judgement of God upon the sinners.”[493]
For this sacrilege and impiety Sir Geoffrey was excommunicated, but, deriding the spiritual thunders, he went and laid siege to the royal castle at Burwell. After a successful attack which brought him to the foot of the rampart, he took off his helmet, it being summer-time and the weather hot, that he might breathe more freely, when a foot soldier belonging to the garrison shot an arrow from a loophole in the castle wall, and gave him a slight wound on the head; “which slight wound,” says our worthy monk of Newburgh, “although at first treated with derision, after a few days destroyed him, so that that most ferocious man, never having been absolved from the bond of the ecclesiastical curse, went to hell.”[494]
Peter de Langtoft thus speaks of these evil doings of the earl of Essex, in his curious poetic chronicle.
“The abbay of Rameseie bi nyght he robbed it
The tresore bare aweie with hand thei myght on hit.
Abbot, and prior, and monk, thei did outchace,
Of holy kirke a toure to theft thei mad it place.
Roberd the Marmion, the same wayes did he,
He robbed thorgh treson the kirk of Couentre.
Here now of their schame, what chance befelle,
The story sais the same soth as the gospelle:
Geffrey of Maundeuile to fele wrouh he wouh,[495]
The deuelle gald him his while with an arrowe him slouh.
The gode bishop of Chestre cursed this ilk Geffrey,
The lif out of his estre in cursing went away.
Arnulf his sonne was taken als thefe, and brouht in bond,
Before the kyng forsaken, and exiled out of his lond.”[496]
The monks of Walden tell us, that as the earl lay wounded on his sick couch, and felt the hand of death pressing heavy upon him, he bitterly repented of his evil deeds, and sought, but in vain, for ecclesiastical assistance. At last some Knights Templars came to him, and finding him humble and contrite, praying earnestly to God, and making what satisfaction he could for his past offences, they put on him the habit of their religion marked with the red cross. After he had expired, they carried the dead body with them to the Old Temple at London; but as the earl had died excommunicated, they durst not give him christian burial in consecrated ground, and they accordingly soldered him up in lead, and hung him on a crooked tree in their orchard.[497] Some years afterwards, through the exertions and at the expense of William, whom the earl had made prior of Walden Abbey, his absolution was obtained from pope Alexander the Third, so that his body was permitted to be received amongst Christians, and the divine offices to be celebrated for him. The prior accordingly endeavoured to take down the corpse and carry it to Walden; but the Templars, being informed of his design, buried it in their own cemetery at the New Temple,[498] in the portico before the western door of the church.[499]
Pope Alexander, from whom the absolution was obtained, was elected to the pontifical chair in September, 1159, and died in 1181. It was this pontiff who, who by the bull omne datum optimum, promulgated in the year 1162, conceded to the Templars the privilege of having their own cemeteries free from the interference of the regular clergy. The land whereon the convent of the New Temple was erected, was purchased soon after the publication of the above bull, and a cemetery was doubtless consecrated there for the brethren long before the completion of the church. To this cemetery the body of the earl was removed after the absolution had been obtained, and when the church was consecrated by the patriarch, (A. D. 1185,) it was finally buried in the portico before the west door.
The monks of Walden tell us that the above earl of Essex was a religious man, endowed with many virtues.[500] He was married to the famous Roisia de Vere, of the family of the earls of Oxford, who in her old age led an ascetic life, and constructed for herself an extraordinary subterranean cell or oratory, which was curiously discovered towards the close of the last century.[501] He had issue by this illustrious lady four sons, Ernulph, Geoffrey, William, and Robert. Ernulph was exiled as the accomplice of the father in his evil deeds, and Geoffrey succeeded to the title and the estates.
The second of the cross-legged figures on the south side, in the Round of the Temple Church, is the monumental effigy of
William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke,