The name “Bloet,” according to M. de Rémusat (Anselme, 160), is the same as “blond.”
The Mission of Abbot Geronto.
I am not aware that this mission of the Abbot of Dijon has hitherto found any place in any narrative history of the times of William Rufus. And I confess that it is not without a certain misgiving that I bring it in. It is certainly remarkable that our own writers should with one consent pass by an event of this kind; but it would be yet more amazing if it were sheer mistake or invention on the part of the foreign writer who records it. It is one of those cases in which, without any actual contradiction, it is very hard to bring a certain statement into its right place. There is nothing in the story told by Hugh of Flavigny which is really inconsistent with the narrative of Eadmer; our only difficulty is how it came that, if these things happened, Eadmer, who could not fail to have known of them, did not think them worthy of any place in his very minute narrative. This difficulty we must get over how we can. Otherwise the evidence of Hugh of Flavigny is in a certain sense as good as that of Eadmer himself. He stood to Abbot Geronto in much the same relation in which Eadmer stood to Anselm. In his narrative, Geronto is sent by the Pope on a mission to Normandy and England, and Hugh himself, a monk of Geronto’s monastery, comes with him. For the mere facts therefore of Geronto’s mission Hugh is as good a witness as Eadmer; but, as a foreigner on a short visit, he could not be expected to have the same thorough knowledge of English affairs as Eadmer, or any other English, or even Norman, writer. There is to us at least something very strange in his tone towards Anselm, or rather in the lack of any mention of Anselm at all. He never speaks of him by name, and the only fact which he records of him is the very strange one which I have mentioned in p. 535, that at some time, seemingly at the reception of the pallium, Anselm took an oath to the Pope, with a reservation of his duty to the King. One hardly sees how far he means to blame Anselm. The person chiefly blamed is Cardinal Walter; Anselm comes in, in a strange casual way, between the King and the Cardinal.
I have given the whole or nearly the whole of Hugh’s story in the foot-notes to those parts of the text which are founded upon his account. He goes on a little later in his story (Pertz, viii. 495, 496) to record the death of William Rufus, and to say something more about English affairs in general. It is plain that his friends in England found him perfectly ready to believe the wildest tales that they chose to tell him. At the same time, the tales that they did tell him are such as could hardly have come into any man’s head to tell, except in the reign of William Rufus. It is Hugh of Flavigny who tells us those specially amazing stories to which I have referred in vol. i. p. 544 and p. 503. He has also (496) some odd notices of the dogs of the city of London, which were small, but very fierce, and which gathered together by night in front of Saint Paul’s church, so that no one could dare to pass by. He has also a good deal to say about those natural phænomena of the reign of which we have heard a good deal from other writers. He tells the story of the storm which visited the church of Saint Mary-le-bow, with some further embellishment, that “quadros super muri altitudinem sitos, supra quos tectum stabilitum erat, usque ad septem milliaria evolare fecit.” And while two servants of the church were sleeping in one bed, a beam was driven down between them into the earth without doing them any harm, except nearly frightening them to death; “In eadem etiam ecclesia jacebat quidem ædituus cum alio quodam in lecto uno, et inter medium eorum, cum jacerent distante inter se spacio, una trabium vento acta per medium lecti terram intravit, ut vix summitas ejus appareret, nec læsit jacentes, nisi quod timore pene exanimati sunt.”
Hugh’s Chronicle, in two books, reaches from the Christian æra to the year 1102. He was born at Verdun in 1065. He was a monk, first at Verdun, then at Flavigny in the diocese of Toul, then at Dijon, and lastly Abbot of Flavigny. Jarento or Geronto—I hardly know how to spell his name—was in the close confidence of Gregory the Seventh and his successors. There is a letter of Anselm’s (iii. 87) addressed to Geronto; but it contains nothing bearing on his mission to England. It is all concerned with the affairs of certain monks at Dijon and Chartres.
NOTE BB. [Vol. ii. p. 9.]
The Embassies between William Rufus and Malcolm in 1093.
The fullest and clearest narrative of the transactions between William Rufus and Malcolm which led to their rupture at Gloucester in 1093 comes from the Chronicle, while some particular points are given at greater length by Florence. In the Chronicle the story runs thus;