Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln Part 6

"Staff to the bishops, to the monks a measure true, Counsel for schools, kings' hammer--such behold was Hugh!"

The next day at the funeral his cheap vestments were torn in pieces by the relic-hunting, which it must be confessed he had done nothing to check; and he was buried near the wall not far from the altar of St.

John Baptist, and, as seemed more suitable for the crowds who came there, on the northern side of the building itself.{32}

This tremendous funeral long lived in men's memory, and there is a far prettier verse about it than the old distich of John--

"A' the bells o' merrie Lincoln Without men's hands were rung, And a' the books o' merrie Lincoln Were read without man's tongue; And ne'er was such a burial Sin' Adam's days begun."

Pa.s.sing by the shower of gold rings, necklaces, and bezants which were given at his shrine, it is certain that the coals of enthusiasm were blown by the report of miracles, never for very long together kept at bay by mediaeval writers. While wis.h.i.+ng to avoid the _affirmatio falsi_ and to give no heed to lying fables, we must not risk being guilty of a _suppressio veri_. The miracles at the tomb come in such convenient numbers that their weight, though it possibly made the guardians of the shrine, yet breaks the tottering faith of the candid reader. But some are more robust, and for them there is a lively total which makes Giraldus's lament for the fewness of miracles in his day seem rather ungrateful. "Four quinsies"--well, strong emotion will do much for quinsies. "One slow oozing"--the disease being doubtful, we need not dispute the remedy. "Three paralytics"--in the name of Lourdes, let them pa.s.s. "Three withered, two dumb, two hunchbacks, one boy dead"--here we falter. "One jaundice case" sounds likelier; "one barren woman" need not detain us. "Four dropsies, four blind, and nine lunatics"--and now we know the worst of it. It would have been a great deal easier to accept the whole in a venture (or forlorn hope) of faith if Hugh had witnessed and some one else performed these miracles, for he had a scrupulously veracious mind. He was so afraid of even the shadow of a lie that he used to attemper what he said with words of caution whenever he repeated what he had done or heard: "that is only as far as I recollect." He would not clap his seal to any letter which contained any questionable statement. "We remember to have cited you elsewhere," a common legal phrase, would d.a.m.n a doc.u.ment if he did not remember, literally and personally, to have done so. His influence, too, can be discerned in the candid Adam, whose honest tale often furnishes us with an antidote to his impossible surmises. But veracity, unfortunately, is not highly infectious, and it is a little difficult not to believe that the high and serene virtues of the great man gone were promptly exploited for the small men left. One miracle there seems no reason to doubt. John, in an almost maudlin fit of emotional repentance, made peace at the funeral with his Cistercian enemies and founded them a home at Beaulieu in the New Forest. Indeed, these were the true miracles which recommended Hugh to the English people, so that they regarded him as a saint indeed, and clamoured for him to be called one formally--the miracles wrought upon character, the callous made charitable, liars truthful, and the lechers chaste; the miracles of justice, of weak right made strong against proud might, and poor honesty made proof against rich rascality; the miracle of England made the sweeter and the handsomer for this humble and heavenly stranger.

The later history need not detain us long. His body was moved, says Thomas Wykes in the _Annales Monastici_, in the year 1219. Perhaps--and this is a mere guess--the place where his body lay was injured at the time of the battle and capture of Lincoln two years before; and for better protection the coffin was simply placed unopened in that curious position two-thirds into the wall of the apse foundation, where it was found in our day. In 1220 he was canonized by Pope Honorius III., who was then at Viterbo organising a crusade, after a report vouching for the miracles drawn up by the great Archbishop Stephen Langton and John of Fountains, a just and learned man, afterwards Treasurer of England.

Sixty years later, that is to say, in 1280, John Peckham, the pious friar archbishop, Oliver Sutton, the cloister-building Bishop of Lincoln, and others, among them King Edward I. and his good wife Eleanor, opened the tomb and lifted out the body into a shrine adorned with gold and jewels and placed it upon a marble pedestal in the Angel Choir, either where the modern tomb of Queen Eleanor now stands or just opposite. The head came away and sweated wonder-working oils, and was casketted and placed at the end of the present Burghersh tombs, as a shrine of which the broken pedestal and the knee-worn pavement are still to be seen. The body was placed in a shrine cased with plates of gold and silver, crusted with gems, and at the last protected by a grille of curious wrought iron. A tooth, closed in beryl with silver and gilt, appears as a separate item in the Reformation riflings. The history of both shrines and of the bones they held is a tale by itself, like most true tales ending in mystery. Perhaps, as King Henry VIII. had not much veneration for holy bones, but, like our enlightened age, much preferred gold, silver, and jewels, his destroying angels may have left the relics of Hugh's forsaken mortality to the lovely cathedral, where his memory, after seven centuries, is still pathetically and tenderly dear.

FOOTNOTES:

{27} Which alone still survives.

{28} Dunstan, Alphege, Lanfranc, Anselm, and others presumably.

{29} Roger de Roldeston, William de Blois, and Richard of Kent.

{30} November 18, 1200.

{31} Possibly on the site where St. Hugh's chapel now stands in desolation.

{32} _A boreali ipsius aedis regione_, not of the cathedral, but of the new honeycomb apse, please.