There is just one other story which I will tell you about him, and this shows his haughty and imperious side.
The Castle at Ledbury belonged to him as Bishop, so did the right of hunting over the Malvern Hills, which were Church lands.
It is quite possible that he did not care in the least for hunting himself, and that he would have granted the privilege to anyone who had come and asked him for it. But when, one day, he was riding with his attendants on these same Malvern Hills, and heard the sound of a hunting-horn, and, on asking what it meant, was told that Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, who was at that time the most powerful noble in England, also claimed the right of hunting there, and was out that day with his hounds, his anger rose, and he rode forward alone to meet the Earl and order him off the ground.
The Earl looked at him contemptuously, and, answering with a sneer that ‘he was not going to be driven off his ancestral land by a “clergiaster,”’ and that ‘he had a good mind to chastise him for his impertinence,’ rode on.
Not a word spoke the Bishop; he simply turned his horse’s head and galloped back to his attendants.
A few hours later the Earl and his followers, tired out with the chase, had dismounted, and were resting under the shade of a wide-spreading oak, when the trampling of hoofs was heard.
Looking up, they saw an extraordinary procession, a procession which was generally only to be seen in a church.
There was the Bishop in the foreground, vested in mitre, cope, and stole, and there, behind him, rode his attendant priests and acolytes, carrying lighted candles, and a great bell, and a book!
And while the Earl stared at them, half in anger, half in fear, the book was opened, the candles extinguished, the bell tolled, the most solemn curses of the Church levelled at his head, and a form of excommunication read, whereby he was denied all the rites of his religion, even Christian burial itself.
And all this because he had hunted the wild deer on the Malvern Hills in defiance of Bishop de Cantilupe, which in Bishop de Cantilupe’s eyes meant in defiance of Almighty God.