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CAMEO IX. THE LAST SAXON BISHOP. (1008-1095.)
Kings of England.
1066. William I.
1087. William II.
The last saint of the Anglo-Saxon Church, the Bishop who lived from the days of Edward the Confessor, to the evil times of the Red King, was Wulstan of Worcester, a homely old man, of plain English character, and of great piety. The quiet, even tenor of his life is truly like a “soft green isle” in the midst of the turbulent storms and tempests of the Norman Conquest.
Wulstan was born at Long Itchington, a village in Warwickshire, in the time of Ethelred the Unready. He was the son of the Thane Athelstan, and was educated in the monasteries of Evesham and Peterborough. When he had been trained in such learning as these could afford, he came home for a few years, and entered into the sports and occupations of the noble youths of the time, without parting with the piety and purity of his conventual life, and steadily resisting temptation.
His parents were grown old, and having become impoverished, perhaps by the exactions perpetrated either by the Danes, or to bribe them away, retired from the world, and entered convents at Worcester. Wulstan, wishing to devote himself to the Church, sought the service of the Bishop, who ordained him to the priesthood.
He lived, though a secular priest, with monastic strictness, and in time obtained permission from the Bishop to become a monk in the convent, where he continued for twenty-five years, and at length became Prior of the Convent. The Prior was the person next in office to the Abbot, and governed the monastery in his absence; and in some religious orders, where there was no Abbot, the Prior was the superior.
Wulstan’s habits in the convent show us what the devotional life of that time was. Each day he bent the knee at each verse of the seven Penitential Psalms, and the same at the 119th Psalm at night. He would lock himself into the church, and pray aloud with tears and cries, and at night he would often retire into some solitary spot, the graveyard, or lonely village church, to pray and meditate. His bed was the church floor, or a narrow board, and stern were his habits of fasting and mortification; but all the time he was full of activity in the cause of the poor, and, finishing his devotions early in the morning, gave up the whole day to attend to the common people, sitting at the church door to listen to, and redress, as far as in him lay, the grievances that they brought him—at any rate, to console and advise. The rude, secular country clergy, at that time, it may be feared, a corrupt, untaught race, had in great measure ceased to instruct or exhort their flocks, and even refund baptism without payment. He did his best to remedy these abuses, and from all parts of the country children were brought to the good Prior for baptism. Every Sunday, too, he preached, and the Worcestershire people flocked from all sides to hear his plain, forcible language, though he never failed to rebuke them sharply for their most prevalent sins.
The fame of the holy Prior of Worcester began to spread, and on one occasion Earl Harold himself came thirty miles out of his way to confess his sins to him and desire his prayers.
About the year 1062, two Roman Cardinals came to Worcester with Aldred, who had just been translated from that see to the Archbishopric of York. They spent the whole of Lent in Wulstan’s monastery; and when, at Easter, they returned to the court of Edward the Confessor, they recommended him for the Bishop to succeed Aldred; and Aldred himself, Archbishop Stigand, and Harold, all concurred in the same advice. The people and clergy of Worcester with one voice chose the good Prior Wulstan; his election was confirmed by the king, and he received the appointment. He long struggled against it, protesting that he would rather lose his head than be made a Bishop; but he was persuaded at last by an old hermit, who rebuked him for his resistance as for a sin. He received the pastoral staff from King Edward, and was consecrated by his former Bishop, Aldred.
As a Bishop he was more active than ever, constantly riding from place to place to visit the different towns and villages; and, as he went, repeating the Psalms and Litany, his attendant priests making the responses; while his chamberlain carried a purse, from which every one who asked alms was sure to be supplied. He never passed a church without praying in it, and never reached his resting-place for the night without paying his first visit to the church. Wherever he went, crowds of every rank poured out to meet him, and he never sent them away without the full Church service, and a sermon; nay, more—each poor serf might come to him, pour out his troubles, whether temporal, or whether his heart had been touched by the good words he had heard. Above all, Wulstan delighted in giving his blessing in Confirmation, and would go on from morning till night without food, till all his clergy were worn out, though he seemed to know no weariness.
His clergy seem to have had much of the sluggishness of the Saxon, and were often impatient of a temper, both of devotion and energy, so much beyond them. If one was absent from the night service, the Bishop would take no notice till it was over; but when all the others were gone back to bed, he would wake the defaulter, and make him go through the service with no companion but himself, making the responses. They did not like him to put them out, as he often did on their journeys, while going through the Psalms, by dwelling on the “prayer-verses;” and most especially did they dislike his leading them to church, whatever season or weather it might be, to chant matins before it was light. Once, at Marlow, when it was a long way to church, very muddy, and with a cold rain falling, one of his clergy, in hopes of making him turn back, led him into the worst part of the swamp, where he sunk up to his knees in mud, and lost his shoe; but he took no notice until, after the service was over, he had returned to his lodgings, half dead with cold, and then, instead of expressing any anger, he only ordered search to be made for the shoe.
Wulstan took no part in what we should call politics; he thought it his duty to render his submission to the King whom the people had chosen, and to strive only to amend the life of the men of the country. He was in high favor with Harold during his short reign, and was for some time at court, where the fine Saxon gentlemen learnt to dread the neighborhood of the old Bishop; for Wulstan considered their luxury as worthy of blame, and especially attacked their long flowing hair. If any of them placed their heads within, his reach, he would crop off “the first-fruits of their curls” with his own little knife, enjoining them to have the rest cut off; and yet, if Wulstan saw the children of the choir with their dress disordered, he would smooth it with his own hands, and when told the condescension did not become a Bishop, made answer, “He that is greatest among you shall be your servant.”
Aldred, Wulstan’s former Bishop, now Archbishop of York, was the anointer of both Harold and William the Conqueror. He kept fair with the Normans as long as he could, but at last, driven to extremity by the miseries they inflicted on his unhappy diocese, he went to William arrayed in his full episcopal robes, solemnly revoked his coronation blessing, denounced a curse on him and his race, and then, returning to York, there died of grief.
Eghelwin, Bishop of Durham, gave good advice to Comyn, the Norman Earl, but it was unheeded, and the townsmen rose in the night and burnt Comyn to death, with all his followers, as they lay overcome with wine and sleep in the plundered houses. The rising of the northern counties followed, and Eghelwin was so far involved in it, that he was obliged to fly. He took shelter in the Camp of Refuge, was made prisoner when it was betrayed, and spent the rest of his life in one of William’s prisons.
Our good Wulstan had a happier lot, and spent his time in his own round of quiet duties in his diocese, binding up the wounds inflicted by the cruel oppressors, but exhorting the Saxons to bear them patiently, and see in them the chastisement of their own crimes. “It is the scourge of God that ye are suffering,” he said; and when they replied that they had never been half so bad as the Normans, he said, “God is using their wickedness to punish your evil deserts, as the devil, of his own evil will, yet by God’s righteous will, punishes those with whom he suffers. Do ye, when ye are angry, care what becomes of the staff wherewith ye strike?”
He had his own share of troubles and anxieties, but he met them in his trustful spirit, and straight-forward way. At Easter, 1070, a council was held at Winchester, at which he was summoned to attend. He was one of the five last Saxon Bishops; Stigand, who held both at once the primacy and the see of Winchester; his brother, Eghelmar, Bishop of Elmham; Eghelsie, of Selsey; and the Bishop of Durham, Eghelwin, who was in the Camp of Refuge.
Two cardinals were present to represent the Pope, and on account of his simony, Stigand was deposed and imprisoned, while Eghelric and Eghelmar were also degraded. Yet Wulstan, clear of conscience, and certain of the validity of his own election, was not affrighted; so far from it, he boldly called on the King to restore some lands that Aldred of York had kept back from the see of Worcester.
Thomas, Aldred’s successor, claimed them by a pretended jurisdiction over Worcester, and the decision was put off for a court of the great men of the realm, which did not take place till several fresh appointments had been made. Lanfranc, the Italian, Abbot of Bec, had become Archbishop of Canterbury, and was, of course, interested in guarding the jurisdiction of the Archiepiscopal see.
Wulstan, in this critical time, was exactly like himself. He fell asleep while Thomas was arguing, and when time was given him to think of his answer, he spent it in singing the service of the hour, though his priests were in terror lest they should be ridiculed for it. “Know you not,” he answered, “that the Lord hath said, ‘When ye stand before king and rulers, take no thought what ye shall speak, for it shall be given you in that hour what ye shall speak.’ Our Lord can give me speech to-day to defend my right, and overthrow their might.” Accordingly, his honest statement prevailed, and he gained his cause.
There is a beautiful legend that Lanfranc, thinking the simple old Saxon too rude and ignorant for his office, summoned him to a synod at Westminster, and there called on him to deliver up his pastoral staff and ring. Wulstan rose, and said he had known from the first that he was not worthy of his dignity, and had taken it only at the bidding of his master, King Edward. To him, therefore, who gave the staff, he would resign it. Advancing to the Confessor’s tomb, he said, “Master, thou knowest how unwillingly I took this office, forced to it by thee. Behold a new king—a new law—a new primate; they decree new rights, and promulgate new statutes. Thee they accuse of error in having so commanded—me of presumption, in having obeyed. Then, indeed, thou wast liable to err, being mortal—now, being with God, thou canst not err. Not to these who require what they did not give, but to thee, who hast given, I render up my staff. Take this, my master, and deliver it to whom thou wilt.”
He laid it on the tomb, took off his episcopal robes, and sat down among the monks. The legend goes on to say, that the staff remained embedded in the stone, and no hand could wrench it away, till Wulstan himself again took it up, when it yielded without effort. The King and Archbishop fell down at his feet, and entreated his pardon and blessing.
Such is the story told a century after; and surely we may believe that, without the miracle, the old man’s touching appeal to his dead King, and his humility, convinced Lanfranc that it had been foul shame to think of deposing such a man because his learning was not extensive, nor his manners like those of the courtly Norman. Be that as it may, thenceforth Lanfranc and Wulstan worked hand in hand, and we find the Archbishop begging him to undertake the visitation of the diocese of Chester, which was unsafe for the Norman prelates. One great work accomplished by the help of Wulstan was, the putting an end to a horrible slave-trade with Ireland, whither Saxon serfs were sold, not by Normans, but by their own country people, who had long carried it on before the Conquest. Lanfranc persuaded William to abolish it, but the rude Saxon slave-merchants cared nothing for his edicts, until the Bishop of Worcester came to Bristol, and preached against the traffic, staying a month or two at a time, every year, till the minds of the people of Bristol were so altered, that they not only gave up the trade, but acquired such a horror of it that they tore out the eyes of the last person who persisted in it.
The favor and esteem with which Wulstan was regarded did not cease, but he was obliged to spend a life of constraint. The Archbishop made him keep a band of armed retainers to preserve the peace of the country, and they were new and strange companions for the old monk; but as he thought his presence kept them from evil, he did not remain aloof, dining with them each day in the public hall, and even while they sat long over the wine, remaining with them, pledging them good-humoredly in a little cup, which he pretended to taste, and ruminating on the Psalms in the midst of their noisy mirth.
These were the days of church-building—the days of the circular arch, round column, and zigzag moulding; of doorways whose round arch, adorned with border after border of rich or quaint device, almost bewilder us with the multiplicity of detail; of low square towers, and solid walls; of that kind of architecture called Norman, but more properly a branch of the Romanesque of Italy.
Each new Roman Bishop or Abbot thought it his business to renew his clumsy old Saxon minster, and we have few cathedrals whose present structure does not date from the days of the Conqueror or his sons. Walkelyn, Bishop of Winchester, obtained a grant from William of as much timber from Hempage Wood as could be cut in four days and nights; whereupon Walkelyn assembled a huge company of workmen, and made such good use of the time, that when the king passed that way, he cried out, “Am I bewitched, or have I taken leave of my senses? Had I not a most delectable wood in this spot?” where now only stumps were to be seen.
Wulstan had always been a church-builder, and he renewed his cathedral after the Norman fashion; but when it was finished, and the workmen began to pull down the old one, which had been built by St. Oswald, he stood watching them in silence, till at last he shed tears. “Poor creatures that we are,” said he, “we destroy the work of the saints, and think in our pride that we improve upon it. Those blessed men knew not how to build fine churches, but they knew how to sacrifice themselves to God, whatever roof might be over them, and to draw their flocks after them. Now, all we think of is to rear up piles of stones, while we care not for souls.”
Wulstan lived to a great age, survived William and Lanfrane, and assisted to consecrate Anselm. In the last year of his life he kept each festival with still greater solemnity than ever, and his feast for the poor overflowed more than ever before; his stores were exhausted, though he had collected an unusual quantity, and his clergy begged him to shut the gates against the crowds still gathering; but he refused, saying none should go empty away, and some gifts from his rich friends arrived opportunely to supply the need. The Bishop sat in the midst as feasting with them, now grown too feeble to wait on them, as he had always done hitherto.
At Whitsuntide, 1094, he was taken ill, and lingered under a slow fever till the new year, when he died in peace and joy on the 19th of January. His greatest friend, Robert, the Bishop of Hereford, a learned man, understanding all the science of the time, a judge, and a courtly Lorrainer, yet who loved to spend whole days with the unlettered Saxon, came to lay him in his grave. He received, as a gift from the convent, the lambskin cloak that Wulstan used to wear, in spite of the laughter of the gay prelates arrayed in costly furs, keeping his ground by saying, that “the furs of cunning animals did not befit a plain man.” He went home to Hereford, and soon after died, having, it is said, been warned in a vision by St. Wulstan that he must soon prepare to follow him.
CAMEO X. THE CONQUEROR. (1066-1087.)
In speaking of William, the Norman Conqueror, we are speaking of a really great man; and great men are always hard to understand or deal with in history, for, as their minds are above common understandings, their contemporary historians generally enter into their views less than any one else, and it is only the result that proves their wisdom and far-sight. Moreover, their temptations and their sins are on a larger scale than those of other men, and some of the actions that they perform make a disproportionate impression by the cry that they occasion—the evil is remembered, not the good that their main policy effected.
William was a high-minded man, of mighty and wide purposes, one of the very few who understood what it was to be a king. He had the Norman qualities in their fullest perfection. He was devoutly religious, and in his private character was irreproachable, being the first Norman Duke unstained by licence, the first whose sons were all born of his princess wife. He was devout in his habits, full of alms-deeds; and strong and resolute as was his will, he kept it so upright and so truly desirous of the Divine glory and the Church’s welfare, that he had no serious misunderstanding with the clergy, and lived on the most friendly terms with his great Archbishop, Lanfranc.
He was one of those mighty men who, in personal intercourse, have a force of nature that not merely renders opposition impossible, but absolutely masters the will and intention, so that there is not even the secret contradiction of mind. We have seen this in his dealings with both his own Normans and the Saxons who came in contact with him. His presence was so irresistible that men yielded to it unconsciously, but when absent from him they became themselves again, and in the reaction they committed treason against the pledges they seemed to have voluntarily given to him.
He was stern, fiercely stern. His standard and ideal were very high, such as, perhaps, only the saintly could attain to. The men who never quarrelled with him were Lanfranc, Edgar Atheling, and William Fitzosborn. The first was saintly and strong; the second, honest, upright, and simple; the third was endeared by boyish memories, and to these, perhaps, may be added Edward the Confessor and good Bishop Wulstan.
Many others William tried to love and trust—his uncle Odo, his own son, Earls Edwin and Morkar, Waltheof, the sons of Fitzosborn; but they all failed, grieved, and disappointed him. None was strong, noble, or disinterested enough not at one time or other to be a traitor; and, perhaps, his really honest, open enemy, Hereward le Wake, was the person whom he most valued and honored after the above mentioned.
And though his affection was hearty, his wrath when he was disappointed was tremendous. And his disappointments were many, partly because his standard was in every respect far above that of the men around him, and partly because his presence so far lifted them to his level, that, when they fell to their own, he was totally unprepared for the treachery and deceit such a fall involved.
Then down he came on them with implacable vengeance, he was so very “stark,” as the old chronicle has it. Battle, devastation, plunder, lifelong imprisonment, confiscation, requited him who had drawn on himself the terrible wrath of William of Normandy. There were few soft places in that mighty heart; it could love, but it could not pity, and it could not forgive. He was of the true nature to be a Scourge of God.
Hardened and embittered by the selfish treasons that had beset his early boyhood, and which had forced him into manhood before his time, he came to England as one called thither by the late king’s designation, and, therefore, the lawful heir. The Norman law, a confusion of the old Frank and Roman codes, and of the Norwegian pirate customs, he seems to have been glad to leave behind. His native Normans must be ruled by it, but he was an English king by inheritance, and English laws he would observe; Englishmen should have their national share in the royal favor, and in their native land.
But the design proved impracticable. The English had been split into fierce parties long before he came, and the West Saxon, the Mercian Angle, and Northumbrian Dane hated one another still, and all hated the Norman alike; and his Norman, French, and Breton importations lost no love among themselves, and viewed the English natives as conquered beings, whose spoil was unjustly withheld from them by the Duke King.
Rebellion began: by ones, twos, and threes, the nobles revolted, and were stamped out by William’s iron heel, suffering his fierce, unrelenting justice—that highest justice that according to the Latin proverb becomes, in man’s mind at least, the highest injustice. So England lay, trampled, bleeding, indignant, and raising a loud cry of misery; but, in real truth, the sufferers were in the first place the actual rebels, Saxon and Norman alike; next, those districts which had risen against his authority, and were barbarously devastated with fire and sword; and lastly, the places which, by the death or forfeiture of native lords, or by the enforced marriage of heiresses, fell into the hands of rapacious Norman adventurers, who treated their serfs with the brutal violence common in France.
Otherwise, things were left much as they were. The towns had little or no cause of complaint, and the lesser Saxon gentry, with the Franklins and the Earls, were unmolested, unless they happened to have vicious neighbors. The Curfew bell, about which so great a clamor was raised, was a universal regulation in Europe; it was a call to prayers, an intimation that it was bedtime, and a means of guarding against fire, when streets were often nothing but wooden booths thatched. The intense hatred that its introduction caused was only the true English dislike to anything like domiciliary interference.
The King has left us an undoubted testimony to the condition of the country, and the number of Saxons still holding tenures. Nineteen years after his Conquest, he held a council at Gloucester, the result of which was a great “numbering of the people”—a general census. To every city or town, commissioners were sent forth, who collected together the Shire reeve or Sheriff—the Viscount, as the Normans called him—the thegus, the parish priests, the reeves, and franklins, who were examined upon oath of the numbers, names, and holdings of the men of their place, both as they were in King Edward’s days, and at that time. The lands had to be de scribed, whether plough lands or pasture, wood or waste; the mills and fisheries wore recorded, and each farmer’s stock of oxen, cows, sheep, or swine. The English grumbled at the inquiry, called it tyranny, and expected worse to come of it, but there was no real cause for complaint. The primary object of the survey was the land-tax, the Danegeld, as it was called, because it was first raised to provide defences against the Danes, and every portion of arable land was assessed at a fair rate, according to ancient custom, but not that which lay waste. The entire record, including all England save London and the four northern counties, was preserved at Winchester, and called the Winchester Roll, or Domesday Book. It is one of the most interesting records in existence, showing, as it does, the exceeding antiquity of our existing divisions of townships, parishes and estates, and even of the families inhabiting them, of whom a fair proportion, chiefly of the lesser gentry, can point to evidence that they live on soil that was tilled by their fathers before the days of the Norman. It is far more satisfactory than the Battle Roll, which was much tampered with by the monks to gratify the ancestral vanity of gentlemen who were so persuaded that their ancestors ought to be found there, that they caused them to be inserted if they were missing. Of Domesday Book, however, there is no doubt, as the original copy is still extant in its fair old handwriting, showing the wonderful work that the French-speaking scribes made with English names of people and places. Queen Edith, the Confessor’s widow, who was a large landholder, appears as Eddeve, Adeve, Adiva—by anything but her true old English name of Eadgyth. But it was much that the subdued English folk appeared there at all.
The most real grievance that the English had to complain of was the Forest Laws. The Dukes of Normandy had had many a quarrel in their Neustrian home with their subjects, on the vexed question of the chase, their greatest passion; and when William came into England as a victor, he was determined to rule all his own way in the waste and woodland. All the forests he took into his own hands, and the saying was that “the king loved the high deer as if he was their father;” any trespass was severely punched, and if he slaughter of any kind of game was a more serious thing than murder itself.
Chief of all, however, in people’s minds, was his appropriation of the tract of Jettenwald, or the Giant’s Wood, Ytene, in South Hants. A tempting hunting-ground extended nearly all the way from his royal city of Winchester, broad, bare chalk down, passing into heathy common, and forest waste, covered with holly and yew, and with noble oak and beech in its dells, fit covert for the mighty boar, the high deer, and an infinity of game beside.
With William’s paternal feelings toward the deer, he thought the cotters and squatters, the churls and the serfs, on the borders of the wood, or in little clearings in the midst, mischievous interlopers, and at one swoop he expelled them all, and kept the Giant’s Wood solely for himself and his deer, by the still remaining name of the New Forest.
Chroniclers talk of twenty-two mother churches and fifty-two parishes laid waste, but there is no doubt that this was a monstrous exaggeration, and that the population could not have been so dense. At any rate, whatever their numbers, the inhabitants were expelled, the animals were left unmolested for seven years, and then the Norman king enjoyed his sports there among his fierce nobility, little recking that all the English, and many of the Normans, longed that a curse should there light upon his head, or on that of his proud sons.
