Though what a man is counts for more than what he does, yet the services of St. Hugh to England may be briefly summed up. They were (1) Spiritual. He made for personal holiness, uncorruptness of public and private life. He raised the sense of the dignity of spiritual work, which was being rapidly subordinated to civic work and rule. He made people understand that moral obligations were very binding upon all men. (2) Political. He made for peace at home and abroad: at home by restraining the excesses of forestars and tyrants; abroad by opposing the constant war policy against France. (3) Constitutional. He first encountered and checked the overgrown power of the Crown, and laid down limits and principles which resulted in the Church policy of John’s reign and the triumph of Magna Carta. (4) Architectural. He fully developed—even if he did not, as some assert, invent—the Early English style. (5) Ecclesiastical. He counterbalanced St. Thomas of Canterbury, and diverted much of that martyr’s influence from an irreconcileable Church policy to a more reasonable, if less exalted, notion of liberty. (6) He was a patron of letters, and encouraged learning by supporting schools, libraries, historians, poets, and commentators.
Ancient authorities for his Life are:—(1) The Magna Vita, by Chaplain Adam (Rolls); (2) Metrical Life, Ed. Dimock, Lincoln, 1860; (3) Giraldus Cambrensis, VII. (Rolls); (4) Hoveden’s Chronicle (Rolls); (5) Benedicti, Gesta R. Henry II. (Rolls); (6) for trifles, Matthew Paris, I. and II. (Rolls), John de Oxenden (ditto), Ralph de Diceto (ditto), Flores Histor. (ditto), Annales Monastici (ditto); (7) also for collateral information, Capgrave Illustrious Henries (Rolls), William of Newburgh, Richard of Devizes, Gervase’s Archbishops of Canterbury, and Robert de Monte, Walter de Mapes’ De Nugis (Camden Soc). Of modern authorities, (1) Canon Perry’s Life (Murray, 1879) and his article in the Dictionary of National Biography come first; (2) Vie de St. Hughues (Montreuil, 1890); (3) Fr. Thurston’s translation and adaptation of this last (Burns and Oates, 1898); (4) St. Hugh’s Day at Lincoln, A.D. 1900, Ed. Precentor Bramley (pub. by Clifford Thomas, Lincoln, N.D.); (5) Guides to the Cathedral, by Precentor Venables, and also by Mr. Kendrick; (6) Archæological matter, Archæological Institute (1848), Somerset Archæolog. XXXIV., Somerset Notes and Queries, vol. IV., 1895, Lincoln Topographical Soc., 1841-2; (7) Collateral information—cf. Miss Norgate’s “England under Angevin Kings” (Macmillan), Robert Grosseteste, F. E. Stevenson (ditto), Stubbs’ “Opera Omnia” of course, Diocesan History of Lincoln, Grande Chartreuse (Burns and Oates), “Court Life under Plantagenets” (Hall), “Highways in Normandy” (Dearmer);(8) of short studies, Mr. Froude’s and an article in the Church Quarterly, XXXIII., and Mrs. Charles’ “Martyrs and Saints” (S.P.C.K.) are the chief.
Of this last book it is perhaps worth saying that if any man will take the trouble to compare it with John Brady’s Clavis Calendaria, of which the third edition came out in 1815, he will see how much the tone of the public has improved, both in courtesy towards and in knowledge of the great and good men of the Christian faith.
St. Hugh’s Post-Reformation history is worth noting for the humour of it. He is allowed in the Primer Calendar by unauthorised Marshall, 1535; out in Crumwell and Hilsey’s, 1539; out by the authorised Primer of King and Clergy, 1545; still out in the Prayer-books of 1549 and 1552; in again in the authorised Primer of 1553; out of the Prayer-book of 1559; in the Latin one of 1560; still in both the Orarium and the New Calendar of the next year, though out of the Primer 1559; in the Preces Privatas 1564, with a scornful admonitio to say that “the names of saints, as they call them, are left, not because we count them divine, or even reckon some of them good, or, even if they were greatly good, pay them divine honour and worship; but because they are the mark and index of certain matters dependent upon fixed times, to be ignorant of which is most inconvenient to our people”—to wit, fairs and so on. Since which time St. Hugh has not been cast out of the Calendar, but is in for ever.
In the text is no mention of the poor swineherd, God rest him! His stone original lives in Lincoln cloisters, and a reproduction stands on the north pinnacle of the west front (whereas Hugh is on the south pinnacle), put there because he hoarded a peck of silver pennies to help build the House of God. He lives on in stone and in the memories of the people, a little flouted in literature, but, if moral evidence counts, unscathedly genuine: honourable in himself, to the saint who inspired him, and to the men who hailed him as the bishop’s mate—no mean builder in the house not made with hands.
[CHAPTER I]
THE BOY HUGH
St. Hugh is exactly the kind of saint for English folk to study with advantage. Some of us listen with difficulty to tales of heroic virgins, who pluck out their eyes and dish them up, or to the report of antique bishops whose claim to honour rests less upon the nobility of their characters than upon the medicinal effect of their post-mortem humours; but no one can fail to be struck with this brave, clean, smiling face, which looks out upon us from a not impossible past, radiant with sense and wit, with holiness and sanity combined, whom we can all reverence as at once a saint of God and also one of the fine masculine Makers of England. We cherish a good deal of romance about the age in which St. Hugh lived. It is the age of fair Rosamond, of Crusades, of lion-hearted King Richard, and of Robin Hood. It is more soberly an age of builders, of reformers, of scholars, and of poets. If troubadours did not exactly “touch guitars,” at least songsters tackled verse-making and helped to refine the table manners of barons and retainers by singing at dinner time. The voice of law too was not silent amid arms. Our constitutional government, already begotten, was being born and swaddled. The races were being blended. Though England was still but a northern province of a kingdom, whose metropolis was Rouen, yet that kingdom was becoming rather top-heavy, and inclined to shift its centre of gravity northwards. So from any point of view the time is interesting. It is essentially an age of monks and of monasteries; perhaps one should say the end of the age of monastic influence. Pope Eugenius III., the great Suger and St. Bernard, all died when Hugh was a young man. The great enthusiasm for founding monasteries was just beginning to ebb. Yet a hundred and fifteen English houses were founded in Stephen’s reign, and a hundred and thirteen in the reign of Henry II., and the power of the monastic bodies was still almost paramount in the church. It was to the monasteries that men still looked for learning and peace, and the monasteries were the natural harbours of refuge for valiant men of action, who grew sick of the life of everlasting turmoil in a brutal and anarchic world. Indeed, the very tumults and disorders of the state gave the monasteries their hold over the best of the men of action. As the civil life grew more quiet and ordered, the enthusiasm for the cloister waned, and with it the standard of zeal perceptibly fell to a lower level, not without grand protest and immense effort of holy men to keep the divine fire from sinking.
Hugh of Avalon was born in Avalon Castle in 1140, a year in which the great tempest of Stephen’s misrule was raging. In France, Louis VII. has already succeeded his father, Louis VI.; the Moors are in Spain, and Arnold of Brescia is the centre of controversy. Avalon Castle lies near Pontcharra, which is a small town on the Bredo, which flows into the Isere and thence into the Rhone. It is not to be confused with Avallon of Yonne. The Alpine valleys about Pontcharra are lovely with flowers and waters, and have in them the “[foot-prints] of lost Paradise.” Burgundy here owed some loyalty to the empire rather than to France, and its dukes tried to keep up a semi-independent kingdom by a balanced submission to their more powerful neighbours. The very name Hugh was an old ducal name, and there is little doubt that William de Avalon, Hugh’s father, claimed kin with the princes of his land. He was a “flower of knighthood” in battles not now known. He was also by heredity of a pious mind. Hugh’s mother, Anna, a lovely and wealthy lady, of what stock does not appear, was herself of saintly make. She “worshipped Christ in His limbs,” by constantly washing the feet of lepers, filling these wretched outcasts with hope, reading to them and supplying their wants. She seems to have been a woman of intellectual parts, for though she died before Hugh was ten, he had already learned under her, if not from her, to use language as the sacrament of understanding and understanding as the symbol of truth. He had some grip of grammar and logic, and though he did not brood over “Ovid’s leasings or Juvenal’s rascalities,” rather choosing to ponder upon the two Testaments, yet we may gather that his Latin classics were not neglected. The spiritual life of Grenoble had been nourished by a noble bishop, also Hugh, who had seen the vision of seven stars resting upon a certain plot of ground, which induced him to grant the same to St. Bruno, the founder of the Grande Chartreuse. Here he served himself as a simple monk, laying aside his bishop’s robes, not a score of miles from Avalon. This Hugh was a religious and free thinking man, who, though he found evil a great metaphysical stumbling block to faith, yet walked painfully by the latter. He died in 1132 or thereabouts, and his life was most probably the occasion of our Hugh’s name, and of much else about him.
The De Avalons had two other boys both older than Hugh: William, who inherited the lands, and Peter, who was settled by his brother Hugh at Histon, in Cambridge, but he does not seem to have made England his home. Hugh had also at least one cousin, William, on his mother’s side, who attended upon him at Lincoln, and who (unless there were two of the same name) developed from a knight into an holy Canon after his great relative’s decease. These relatives were always ready to lend a hand and a sword if required in the good bishop’s quarrels. The last particularly distinguished himself in a brawl in Lincolnshire Holland, when an armed and censured ruffian threatened the bishop with death. The good Burgundian blood rose, and William twisted the sword from the villain’s hand, and with difficulty was prevented from driving it into his body.
When the Lady Anna died, her husband, tired of war, power, and governance, distributed his property among his children. Under his armour he had long worn the monk’s heart, and now he was able to take the monk’s dress, and to “labour for peace after life, as he had already won it in life.” So he took Hugh and Hugh’s money with him, and went off to the little priory of Villarbenoit (of seven canon power), which bordered upon his own lands, and which he and his forbears had cherished. This little priory was a daughter of Grenoble (St. Hugh of Grenoble being, as we infer, a spiritual splendour to the De Avalons), and, not least in attraction, there was a canon therein, far-famed for heavenly wisdom and for scholarship besides, who kept a school and taught sound theology and classics, under whom sharp young Hugh might climb to heights both of ecclesiastical and also of heavenly preferment. Great was the delight of the canons at their powerful postulant and his son, and great the pains taken over the latter’s education. The schoolmaster laid stress upon authors such as Prudentius, Sedulius, and Fulgentius. By these means the boy not only learnt Latin, but he also tackled questions of Predestination and Grace, glosses upon St. Paul, hymns and methods of frustrating the Arian. Above all, he was exercised in the Divine Library, as they called the Bible, taught by St. Jerome. Hugh was of course the favourite of the master, who whipt him with difficulty, and kept him from the rough sports of his fellow scholars, the future soldiers, and “reared him for Christ.” The boy had a masterly memory and a good grip of his work, whether it were as scholar, server, or comrade. The Prior assigned to him the special task of waiting upon his old father. That modest, kind-hearted gentleman was getting infirm, and the young fellow was delighted to be told off to lead him, carry him, dress and undress him, tie his shoes, towel him, make his bed, cook for him and feed him, until the time of the old knight’s departure arrived.