Daily Reading for November 17 • Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, 1200
Richard I took only a passing interest in the affairs of his kingdom, for his life was so totally absorbed by the Crusades that, out of his whole reign of ten years, he spent only four or five months in England. Meanwhile the government of the country was carried on by his ministers, most of whom were bishops and many of them far more interested in the details of political organization than in the routine of pastoral duties. Hubert Walter, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1193 to 1205 held, in addition to the primacy, the offices of legate, chief justiciar, chancellor and vicegerent. But he was a good and conscientious man, a great civil servant anxious to make a success of his labours and to guide the country through an exceedingly difficult time. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely (1189-97), who was also chancellor, was a less attractive character who made himself much disliked by his domineering and extravagant ways. Geoffrey Plantagenet, an illegitimate son of Henry II, had far less claim to ecclesiastical preferment; yet he became Bishop of Lincoln at the age of fourteen and Archbishop of York seven years later, though his interest in the affairs of the Church was of the very slightest and he spent most of his time abroad. One bishop alone stands out as a shining example of pastoral devotion, and that was S.Hugh of Lincoln.
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Among the minor orders which found their way into England in the twelfth century was the order of Carthusians, founded by S. Bruno at the Grande-Chartreuse in 1086. Unlike most of the other monastic orders the Carthusians were hermit-monks, who renounced the corporate life and lived each in his own cell, where he did his work, cooked his own food and said his prayers. The community met only for the night-office, Mass and vespers. For the rest of the day each monk lived the life of a solitary. The order never made much progress in England, for the life was very hard and the standards remained very high. It produced, however, one of the most saintly characters of the medieval English Church—S. Hugh of Avalon, who came over to found the charterhouse at Witham in 1178 and in 1186 was elected Bishop of Lincoln, where he lived for fourteen years, setting an example of what a really pastoral bishop might be.
From A History of the Church in England by J. R. H. Moorman. Copyright © 1963. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com