England under the Angevin Kings, Volume INorgate, Kate
History
England under the Angevin Kings, Volume I
Norgate, Kate
Anjou, House of; England -- Civilization -- 1066-1485; Great Britain -- History -- Angevin period, 1154-1216
Henry and Roger to venture on trying to fill it from the ranks of the
latter’s party; they gave it to Anselm’s old friend and suffragan,
Ralf, bishop of Rochester.[187] But when Ralf, who at the time of his
election was already an aged man, died in 1122, the seculars, headed by
Roger of Salisbury, made a successful effort to secure a non-monastic
primate. Not daring, however, to go the full length of appointing one
of themselves, they took a middle course and chose a canon regular,
William of Corbeil, prior of S. Osyth’s at Chiche in Essex.[188] The
strict monastic party counted the new sort of canons very little better
than the old ones. William himself, however, was a perfectly blameless
churchman, whose worst fault was a constitutional timidity and
shrinking from political responsibilities which made him powerless to
stem the tide of worldliness among his suffragans, though he at least
kept the metropolitan chair itself safe from contaminating influences.
The case of the other Augustinian prelate is a specially interesting
one. Henry, who so irritated both his English and Norman subjects by
his general preference for foreign churchmen, had nevertheless chosen
for his own spiritual adviser a priest whose name, Eadwulf, shows him
to have been of English origin, and who was prior of an Augustinian
house at Nostell in Yorkshire. The king’s last act before he left
England in 1133, never to return, was to promote his confessor to a
bishopric. Twenty-three years before, following out a cherished plan
of S. Anselm’s, he had caused the overworked bishop of Lincoln to be
relieved of part of his enormous diocese by the establishment of a new
see with the great abbey of Ely for its cathedral and the monks for its
chapter.[189] He now lightened the cares of the archbishop of York
in like manner by giving him a new suffragan whose see was fixed at
Carlisle. Eadwulf was appointed bishop; naturally enough he constituted
his chapter on the principles of his own order; and Carlisle, the last
English bishopric founded before the Reformation, was also the only one
whose cathedral church was served by canons regular of the order of S.
Augustine.[190]
[184] The history of H. Trinity, Aldgate, is printed in the
appendix to Hearne’s edition of William of Newburgh, vol. iii.
pp. 688–709.
[185] The story of S. Bartholomew’s and its founder comes from
“Liber fundacionis ecclesiæ S. Bartholomæi Londoniarum,” a MS.
of Henry II.’s time, part of which is printed in Dugdale’s
_Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 292–295. The remainder is
as yet unprinted; but Dr. Norman Moore has published in the _S.
Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports_, vol. xxi. pp. xxxix.–cix., a
translation made about A.D. 1400; the 22d chapter of this (pp.
lxix., lxx.) contains the account of Alfhun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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