Notable among these persecuting Bishops of Chartres is Robert of Tours,
Cardinal and Legate (1065), who excommunicated a whole parcel of monks
because they refused to accept the abbot he wished to force upon them.
Then, too, there was Arrald, deceitful and fair of speech, against whom
the chronicler is mightily wroth. But the bishop must at least have had
a sense of humour. For his dictum was that gold and silver and the
precious ornaments of the Church had no place in a monastery; they were
only provocative of pride and the occasion of wantonness in the monks.
Therefore he would take such things away, to save them from temptation.
He remarked, too, that it was a wicked thing for monks to eat fish or
the fat of beasts; they ought to eat simple herbs only, and he advised
them to strive to be xerophagi, or eaters of dry, plain food. And to
help them, no doubt, he confiscated their fish ponds, for he had a nice
taste in good fish himself, and a liking for foreign dishes, ‘always
indulging,’ adds our monk savagely, ‘his own natural tendency to
gormandise’ (ventri suo castrimargiam semper habens vernaculam)![45] But
it is the monks themselves who have left us an imperishable tradition of
gormandising; even on fast days they would put a fowl in the pot, and
salve their consciences with the argument that as birds and fishes had
been created on the same day, they might be of the same species; and, as
to drink, they were often under the patronage of S. Martin, in cloisters
or at the tavern, quite theologically drunk. As early as 847 the
councils of the Church were busy with the scandals of monks in inns. And
cleanliness of the body they considered to be a culpable vanity, a
pollution of the soul.
But, whether Arrald deserved the censure of the monk Paul or not, that
kind of bishop was not uncommon in this century. Geoffrey the First,
seven years later, was excommunicated for simony and other vices. His
simony he had defended with shameless cynicism.
When the King reproached him with having given to others the benefices
which he had asked of him, ‘I have not given them at all, sire,’ he
replied; ‘I have sold them very profitably.’
But his treason, his adulteries and his perjuries became at last
unbearable. Pope Gregory VII. determined to make an example of him. He
was compelled to resign his bishopric, and in his stead was appointed
one of the greatest of Chartrain Bishops--S. Ives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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