Joseph Armitage Robinson

“ A. WORCESTER CHARTERS OF ST MARY'S BEFORE ST OSWALD'S TIME
It is a perilous task for one who has not been trained in the modern school of Anglo-Saxon diplomatics to undertake such an examination as here follows. My apology must be that no one, so far as I am aware, has faced the problem of Oswald's reform from the point of view of the authenticity of the charter evidence in regard to what existed at Worcester before his time. I shall gladly welcome correction in detail; but I have an impression that a wider knowledge will only strengthen the case which I have endeavoured to put. ”

“ The world of common things is seen to be a lesson-book of the kingdom of God to those who have eyes to read it. What that kingdom is to be we are not told; we are only taught that its coming is secret, slow and certain. If nature in its ordinary processes was thus seen to be full of significance, the disciples were also to learn that it was under His control. As the boat from which He had been teaching passed to the other side, the tired Teacher slept. A sudden storm terrified the disciples, and they roused Him in alarm. He stilled the storm with a word and rebuked their want of faith. ”

“ Having briefly spoken of the divine nature in the terms of Greek philosophy, Aristides proceeds to ask which of all the races of men have at all partaken of the truth about God. Here we have the first attempt at a systematic comparison of ancient religions. For the purpose of his inquiry he adopts an obvious threefold division into idolaters, Jews and Christians. Idolaters, or, as he more gently terms them in addressing the emperor, “those who worship what among you are said to be gods,” he subdivides into the three great world-civilizations—Chaldeans, Greeks and Egyptians. ”

“ What would this mean but a college of cardinals, with the archbishop sitting as a kind of pope? A new patriarchate would be formed: all causes ecclesiastical would be heard in this court, and none would henceforth cross the sea: England would be to all intents and purposes severed from Rome. The monks, of course, would cease to be 'the church of Canterbury': the new cathedral would supersede the old by sheer force of wealth and influence: it might even claim the body of the martyr in whose name it was dedicated. ”

“ There is the same strength, the same tender sympathy, the same freedom from convention: there is the same promise to fulfil the highest hopes, the same surrender of life, and the same imperious demand on the lives of others. No thoughtful man who examines and compares these pictures can doubt that they are genuine historical portraits of a figure wholly different from any which had hitherto appeared on the world’s stage. They are beyond the power of human invention. They are drawn with a simplicity which is their own guarantee. ”

“ When we insert the knife of criticism we shall discover that many pages of Hearne's careful edition are filled with inventions of a later date, which must no longer be allowed to blot the reputation of the great historian. It is fortunate for us that the so-called third edition of the Gesta Regum contains large insertions which run word for word with passages in the De Antiquitate; so that, if we accept the view that this edition was made by the author himself between the years 1135 and 1140, a valuable instrument of criticism is at once placed in our hands. ”

“ Not a rough prophet in the desert like John, not a leader striking for political freedom, not a pretender aiming at the petty throne of the Herods, not even a great rabbi, building on the patriotic foundation of the Pharisees who had secured the national life by a new devotion to the ancient law. ”

“ So he died an archdeacon—not of Bath indeed, but of London; and his latest letters are pathetic protests to the pope that he has no revenue to support his title, and that the new precentor of St Paul's has ousted him from his stall which was the second in honour to that of the dean.
It is impossible to make a hero of Peter, but his story has much of human interest, and it runs in and out among the great events of a fascinating period of history. His letters indeed are indispensable to the historian; for again and again they take him behind the scenes. ”

“ It shows the disturbing forces of these characteristics, which aroused the envy and apprehension of the leaders of religion. The first bright days of welcome and popularity are soon clouded: the storm begins to lower. More and more the Master devotes Himself to the little circle of His disciples, who are taught that they, as well as He, can only triumph through defeat, succeed by failure, and find their life in giving it away. At length, in fear of religious innovations and pretending that He is a political usurper, the Jews deliver Him up to die on a Roman cross. ”

“ Innocent III, who never let an opportunity pass, saw his way to make the election of the primate of all England a matter to be settled between the pope and the monks of Canterbury. To the English people this was intolerable. The great justiciar, Geoffrey fitz Peter, who diligently sought peace, rose nevertheless at a critical moment and carried all the barons with him in refusing to counsel the king to forgo the proviso 'saving the royal rights and liberties'. Under any other king the nation must have won. ”

“ There is no atmosphere of simplicity and teachableness which rejoices in the manifestation of power and sympathy and liberty. It is a witness delivered to a hostile audience, whether they will hear or no. Ultimate issues are quickly raised: keen critics see at once the claims which underlie deeds and words, and the claims in consequence become explicit: the relation of the teacher to God Himself is the vital interest. The conflict which thus arose explains what St Mark’s succinct narrative had left unexplained—the fatal hostility of Jerusalem. ”

“ In Sicily they sought to ruin me by offers of bishoprics: you take the opposite course, and after cheating me of more than one prebend, you have supplanted me also in the provostship. God spare you from the fate of the Sicilians: for I wish you no harm.'
We shall see that the provostship of Chartres, on which Peter seems to have had some kind of claim, was again to escape him to his intense chagrin: meanwhile he left France for Normandy, and betook himself once more, as we have already observed, to Rotrou, the archbishop of Rouen. ”

“ The duties of a deacon are described, and the prayer of his ordination follows (5) . Canons 6-9 deal with various classes in the Church. One who has suffered punishment for the faith (6) is to be counted a presbyter without ordination: “his confession is his ordination.” Readers and sub-deacons (7) are given the Gospel, but are not ordained by laying-on of hands. A claim to ordination on the ground of gifts of healing (8) is to be admitted, if the facts are clear and the healing is from God. Widows are not ordained (9) : “ordination is for men only.” ”

“ I venture to submit that in this great insertion into the Gesta Regum, when we have replaced a single passage, we have the genuine form of the first part of the De Antiquitate. And I would ask any scholar who inclines to question this verdict to set himself the task of translating into English the first few sections of the book as it stands. He will find that his pen runs easily enough as he renders the dull and unidiomatic Latin of the later writers, but that he will have to pause and think before he can do justice to the cultivated and ambitious style of the great historian. ”

“ For earthly needs no thought is to be taken: the birds and the flowers make no provision for their life and beauty. God will give food and raiment to those who are seeking His kingdom. Earthly goods should be given away in exchange for the imperishable treasures. Suddenly will the Son of Man come: happy the servant whom His Master finds at his appointed task. In brief parables the kingdom of God is likened to a mustard-seed and to leaven. When Jesus is asked if the saved shall be few, He replies that the door is a narrow one. ”

“ Happily there is a business side to the rhapsody which may provide a clue. The isle of Glastonbury, Mother of the Saints, the Second Rome, had in virtue of this precious charter privileges of indulgence to offer to her pilgrims, worthy of her high antiquity and her divine consecration. Ten years—some said thirty—gained by St Phagan and St Deruvian from Pope Eleutherus; twelve more gained by St Patrick from Pope Celestine: while for those who made the toilsome ascent of the Tor St Phagan and St Deruvian had gained thirty more. ”

“ It seems plain that we have two lines of tradition: (1) The Canons of Hippolytus, followed by the Canons of Basil; (2) the Egyptian Church Order, itself represented (a) by the Latin version, the Testament of the Lord, and the Apostolic Constitutions, which are linked together by the same preface (or portions of it) ; (b) by the Coptic and Aethiopic versions. Now, the preface of the Latin version points to a time when the canons were embodied in a corpus of similar materials, or, at the least, were preceded by a work on “Spiritual Gifts.” ”

“ The great abbey of Glastonbury lay in his new diocese. As the archbishop was the abbot of the monks of his cathedral church of Canterbury, and as Winchester, Worcester, and Bath itself had a like arrangement, why should Savary not be the abbot of Glastonbury and make that also a cathedral church? There would be no more quarrels then between bishop and abbot, and the bishop of Bath and Glastonbury would be a great prelate indeed. So the emperor made the king agree to this new proposal. ”

“ We must not attempt to trace in detail the whole of St Mark’s story. We have followed it long enough to see its directness and simplicity, to observe the naturalness with which one incident succeeds another, and to watch the gradual manifestation of a personality at once strong and sympathetic, wielding extraordinary powers, which are placed wholly at the service of others, and refusing to be hindered from helping men by the ordinary restrictions of social or religious custom. ”

“ They moved the bishop's seat from the country to the town: they built new churches on an unexampled scale: they assigned part of the estates to the cathedral clergy, as prebends for individual canons and as a common fund to be divided among those who were actually in residence. An independent corporation was thus created, with a dean at the head as president of the chapter and ordinary of the church, a precentor to look after the services and the music, a chancellor to rule the schools and provide the books, and a treasurer to care for the vestments and other valuables. ”

“ But with eminent ability and indomitable courage they succeeded in identifying their cause with that of the papal jurisdiction in England, and showed by the sufferings which they wittingly drew upon themselves that they would die sooner than yield. They were confronted by an archbishop, pious, austere, and as unyielding as themselves, supported by the entire episcopate, a few names only excepted; and they had to deal with a subtle king, who held himself in the background at first, but presently declared that he would sooner lose his crown than see the monks victorious. ”

“ To begin with, it contained a fuller account of the teaching of John the Baptist. St Mark tells us only his message of hope; but here we read the severer language with which he called men to repentance. We hear his warning of “the coming wrath”: his mighty Successor will baptize with fire; the fruitless tree will be cast into the fire; the chaff will be separated from the wheat and burned with unquenchable fire; the claim to be children of Abraham will not avail, for God can raise up other children to Abraham, if it be from the stones of the desert. ”

“ In the service of Archbishop Baldwin Peter of Blois was destined to play a prominent part in an ecclesiastical struggle, which but for the loss of Jerusalem, the death of the pope, and the death of the king might even have brought about the severance of the Church of England from the papacy. It was only the monks of a single monastery who were fighting to preserve privileges of exemption to which they had in fact no longstanding claim. ”

“ But such as did receive Him found a new birth, beyond their birth of flesh and blood: they became children of God, were born of God. In order thus to manifest Himself He had undergone a human birth: “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory”—the glory, as the evangelist has learned to see, of the Father’s only-begotten Son, who has come into the world to reveal to men that God whom “no man hath ever seen.” In these opening words we are invited to study the life of Christ from a new point of view, to observe His self-manifestation and its issue. ”

“ The prebends were too small to attract men of distinction unless they could be held in plurality; and the king's business, far more than the archbishop's, continually drew off the abler canons. In 1215, the last year in which Richard Poore was dean, his reforms were embodied in a 'new constitution', which required that a fourth part of the canons, besides the quatuor personae, should always be in residence; if for reasonable cause (other than the admitted exemptions) a canon did not keep his turn, he was to pay one-fifth of the value of his prebend. ”

“ Life, he declared, could only be saved by voluntary death. He went on to demand an unswerving loyalty to Himself and His teaching in the face of a threatening world; and then He promised that some of those who were present should not die before they had seen the coming of the kingdom of God. We have had no hint of such teaching as this in the whole of the Galilean ministry. Jesus had stood forth as the strong healer and helper of men ”

“ It was probably between March and October of the year 1191 that Peter of Blois had a long and severe illness. At the close of it he wrote a letter of apology to the prior and monks of Canterbury for the part which he had taken against them (Ep. 233) . He throws the whole blame on the late king: 'He constrained and compelled me to act for the archbishop against you, yea, against God and my own self; and to toil for eight months in the Roman court at my own charges and in continual peril of my life. ”

“ No Gospel is so frequently quoted by the early post-apostolic writers: none has exercised a greater influence upon Christianity, and consequently upon the history of the world.
Yet from the purely historical point of view its evidential value is not the same as that of St Mark. Its facts for the most part are simply taken over from the earlier evangelist, and the historian must obviously prefer the primary source. ”

“ We learn from another source that in pursuance of his brother's injunction Reginald had come to Bath and surrendered into the new bishop's hands the lands and rents of the canons which his father and brother had unjustly usurped, and that he became precentor of Wells and received in addition to the precentorship the prebend and whole manor of Combe. [11] This is in harmony with the statement of the Ordinance: 'We have granted Combe as a single prebend to Reginald the precentor for his life, mindful of the benefits conferred on our church by his uncle, Bishop John of good memory'. ”

“ But it has become the fashion to throw aside William of Malmesbury's Enquiry into the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury as a careless piece of work hastily put together to flatter the vanity of the Glastonbury monks when, for some reason which remains obscure to us, the great historian had for a time taken up his abode in their house. ”

“ Peter praises the bishop for thus caring for the clergy of Blois (clerus Blesensis) , who as a body have been scattered and proscribed: he must not however forget something else which he had promised, and which is Peter's own secret: 'You will give your voice the voice of power,' he says again; 'there will be no Yea and Nay with you.' He adds that his archbishop had bidden him write a memorial of the blessed Thomas; but happily he had found that John of Salisbury had done it. ”

“ In the insertion into his third edition of the Gesta Regum he goes much further back, and brings the nameless missionaries of Pope Eleutherus to Glastonbury and makes them the builders of the Old Church of St Mary. He has indeed seen some evidence of a yet earlier origin—the building of the church by actual disciples of Christ. He will not deny the possibility of this; for, if St Philip came to Gaul as Freculfus says, he may well have sent some of his disciples across the sea to Britain. The reader, however, shall not be troubled further with matters of mere opinion. ”

“ In the spring of 669, Benedict had returned from Rome in company with Theodore the new archbishop, who retained him at Canterbury for two years in charge of St Augustine's abbey. If Glastonbury fell vacant about that time, by the death of the British abbot Bregored, we may well believe that, on the advice of Theodore and Benedict Biscop, the king may have appointed such a man as Beorhtwald, whom Bede describes as learned in the Scriptures and very highly trained alike in ecclesiastical and monastic discipline. [8] The position of Glastonbury would be exceptionally difficult. ”

“ Peter tells us that he himself left England with the king (Ep. 87) ; but it is probable that he soon returned. About this time he had got the deanery of Wolverhampton, a royal peculiar. Every one was getting appointments from the king, who sold everything to raise money for the Crusade. But the bigger things cost much, and Peter was too honest to pay anything at all: this may have been given to him as a solatium. He writes to Longchamp, the new chancellor, to implore his aid against the sheriff of Stafford, who was contravening the ancient privileges of the church of Wolverhampton. ”