Hugh of Lincoln(1)
Hugh of Lincoln (c.1140–1200), Carthusian monk and bishop. Born at Avalon near Grenoble, in Imperial Burgundy, he was educated and made his profession in the priory of Austin Canons at Villarbenoít. At the age of about twenty-five he became a monk at the Grande Chartreuse. He became its procurator c.1175 and was invited by King Henry II to become prior of his languishing Charterhouse at Witham (Somerset), founded in reparation for the murder of Thomas of Canterbury, but insufficiently endowed and ruled by two unsuitable priors in succession. Under Hugh it soon flourished rapidly and attracted several distinguished monks and canons as its inmates.
In 1186 Henry chose him as bishop of Lincoln, but he refused to accept because he believed the election was uncanonical. Eventually he undertook to rule this, the largest diocese in England, only in obedience to the prior of the Grande Chartreuse. To help him in the task, he carefully chose worthy and learned men as his canons, to several of whom, as archdeacons, he delegated much government.
Reputedly the most learned monk in the country, he revived the Lincoln schools, considered by Gerald of Wales to be second only to Paris. He extended his cathedral, damaged by an earthquake; sometimes he worked on it with his own hands; part of his choir and transepts survive. He held synods and visitations; he travelled ceaselessly to consecrate churches, confirm children, and bury the dead. His justice was proverbial: three popes made him judge-delegate for some of the most important cases of his time, and the king also appointed him to act in his court. Always a friend of the oppressed, he tended lepers and risked his life in riots to save some Jews from death.
He was the friend, but also the critic, of three Angevin kings. He excommunicated royal foresters and refused to appoint courtiers to church benefices. He overcame Henry's anger on this occasion by an impudent joke. Later, a playful shaking dissolved the anger of Richard I, caused by Hugh's refusal to provide knight-service overseas at the Council of Oxford (1197), the first recorded instance of its kind. His admonitions of John at the beginning of his reign, however, had little effect, although he did help to carry Hugh's coffin at his funeral.
Hugh witnessed the treaty of Le Goulet but, after visiting his home and various French monasteries, fell mortally ill in his London house. On his death-bed he gave clear instructions about completing the cathedral and about his own funeral arrangements. He also refused to abandon the opposition he had made to Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury. He died on 16 November.
One of his sermons (on care for the dead) has survived and several of his sayings. One of these was that laity who practised charity in the heart, truth on the lips, and chastity in the body would have an equal reward in heaven with monks and nuns. Austere but gentle, intransigent but tender, he was considered by Ruskin as ‘the most beautiful sacerdotal figure known to me in history’.
In 1220 he was canonized by Pope Honorius III, the first Carthusian to receive this honour. His feast became one of the highest rank in Charterhouses from 1339. This fostered interest in him in Flanders and the Rhineland, in France, Italy, and Spain as well as in England. His principal cult was at Lincoln, where the rose window called the Dean's Eye records his funeral and where his relics were translated to a new shrine in the famous Angel Choir in 1280. His shrines here attracted many pilgrims; his feast was kept in the Sarum calendar.
His usual iconographical attribute is his tame swan (from his manor at Stow) or a chalice with the infant Jesus on it, as on the altarpiece from the Charterhouse at Thuison and in Zurbaran's portrait at Cadiz. A picture of him in the Paris Charterhouse became a centre of pilgrimage for mothers with sick children.
His shrine was dismantled at the Reformation, but searches for his body in 1887 and in 1956 proved unsuccessful. His white linen stole, formerly at the Grande Chartreuse, survives in the Charterhouse at Parkminster (West Sussex). Feast: 17 November; translation, 6 October.
Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.
- D. L. Douie and D. H. Farmer, Magna Vita S. Hugonis (1985); R. M. Loomis, Gerald of Wales' Life of Hugh of Avalon (1985 and 2000); C. Gorton, Metrical Life of St. Hugh (1986); for the canonization report, D. H. Farmer in Lincs. Arch, and Archaeol. Soc. Papers, vi (1956), 86–117. Lives by H. Thurston (1898), R. M. Woolley (1927), and D. H. Farmer (1985 and 2000); see also M. O., pp. 375–91 and C. R. Cheney, Hubert Walter (1967)
