Bishop of Salisbury

“ The bishop and chapter of Salisbury were at the same time warned not to admit him to the deanery. On 24 June the bishops of the province of Canterbury appealed to the pope against the sentence, and Jocelin, bishop of Salisbury, warmly espoused the cause of John of Oxford, and was in consequence suspended by the archbishop. John of Oxford appears to have abandoned the title of dean for a time (Eyton, Itinerary, p. 102) . He was sent in November on a mission to Rome. Becket wrote at once to warn the Archbishop of Mainz against him (Materials, vi. 52) . The mission had considerable success. ”

“ He came under the influence of the Oxford movement, and continued a high churchman to the end of his life. In 1837 he was made examining chaplain to his friend the Bishop of Salisbury, and in 1841 left Oxford with some reluctance to become a canon in Salisbury Cathedral. At Salisbury he threw himself into the duties of his new position with characteristic energy. ”

“ I have been Bishop of Salisbury for sixteen years, in possession of these revenues, and I can truly assert that I have not from the income of my See saved a single shilling. While at no former period of my life, neither when I lived as a fellow of a college, nor when I was incumbent of a small benefice in the country, have I found it so impossible, or have I been so little willing, to spend money in the gratification of personal tastes. ”

“ With Seth Ward [q. v.] , bishop of Salisbury, he was on friendly terms. He communicated as an Anglican. Firmly holding his special tenet, he was always a courteous disputant, and a man of exceptional capacity and attainments.
He died at Salisbury on 22 May 1676, and was buried on 25 May in St. Edmund's churchyard. He was a dapper little man, with a keen glance. By his first wife he had a son John, born at Leominster on 26 Nov. 1636. His second wife, whom he married about 1658, was Elizabeth, widow of Wolstan Abbot of Salisbury. ”

“ When the archbishop of Canterbury celebrated the liturgy in the presence of the bishops of his province, the bishop of Salisbury (probably in consequence of the general adoption of the “Use” of Sarum) acted as precentor of the college of bishops, a title which he still retains. The churches of Lincoln and Bangor also had peculiar “Uses;” but we are not aware that any of their books have been printed. A MS. pontifical, containing the rites and ceremonies performed by the bishop, still (we believe) remains in the church of Bangor ”

“ At a great council held at Pipewell abbey near Geddington on September 15, vacant bishoprics were filled with men whose names were to be conspicuous in the period now beginning. Richard's chancellor, William Longchamp, was made Bishop of Ely; Richard Fitz Nigel, of the family of Roger of Salisbury, son of Nigel, Bishop of Ely, and like his ancestors long employed in the exchequer and to be continued in that service, was made Bishop of London; Hubert Walter, a connexion of Ranulf Glanvill, and trained by him for more important office than was now intrusted to him, became Bishop of Salisbury ”

“ He was summoned to the court by the king, obscure but not without nobility, and taught by his example “how extreme poverty is the school of men.” Increasing in favour with the king, the clergy and the people, he was made bishop of Salisbury, enjoyed the highest offices and honours in the realm, and possessed a consummate knowledge of the Exchequer. ”

“ In the reign of king Henry I., when the mother church was as celebrated for her affluence as for her sanctity (two qualities which are seldom found thus united) , the daughter not yet being in existence (and I sincerely wish she never had been produced) , the fame of so much religion attracted hither Roger, bishop of Salisbury, who was at that time prime minister; for it is virtue to love virtue, even in another man, and a great proof of innate goodness to show a detestation of those vices which hitherto have not been avoided. ”

“ On 9 July 1620 he was consecrated bishop of Salisbury, died 'in a mean condition' on 15 May 1621, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. On 17 June 1604 he married Margaret, daughter of John Davenant, citizen and merchant of London, sister of John Davenant [q. v.] , who succeeded him as bishop of Salisbury, and widow of William Townley. By her, who died on 29 Oct. 1634 and was buried in Salisbury Cathedral, he had a large family. ”

“ It was perhaps Richard Poor, Bishop successively of Chichester, Salisbury, and Durham, in which case it is older than 1237, the year of Richard Poor’s death; or else by Simon of Ghent, a native of London, Archdeacon of Oxford, 1284, Bishop of Salisbury, 1297. He died in 1315. The dates are of importance, because the recluse life would not seem to have become common before the middle of the thirteenth century, and it would further seem to have fallen into disuse by the end of the fourteenth century. ”

“ And to the list we may also most likely add the bishop-elect of Winchester, William Giffard, a tried court official, though 363 one who afterwards showed that he could suffer for a principle. Roger, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. And a man who was to be more famous than all of them, the patriarch of the long line of English Justiciars and Judges, the poor clerk who was to be presently the all-powerful Bishop Roger of Salisbury, may have already given his voice among men who were as yet so far above him in worldly place. ”

“ On this account I do so value the Bishop of Salisbury's letters, and it is so very kind of him to write to me in the midst of the overwhelming occupations of an English diocese.
'I don't think you have mentioned Dr. Vaughan. I read his books with much interest. He doesn't belong to the Keble theology; but he seems to me to be a thoughtful, useful, and eminently practical writer. He seems to know what men are thinking of, and to grapple with their difficulties. ”

“ He kept the see of Canterbury vacant for five years after the death of Anselm; all ecclesiastical matters were governed by political or personal considerations rather than with an eye to the true interests of the Church, and Henry was not above making money from ecclesiastical appointments. His chief adviser was Roger, bishop of Salisbury, an able minister and a magnificent noble, who owed his preferment to his administrative talents ”

“ He signs as bishop the charter of Osmund Bishop of Salisbury in 1091. And if any suspicion is thought to attach to that instrument, the profession rolls at Canterbury, as certified by Dr. Stubbs, are evidence enough of his consecration and his profession to a future archbishop. His consecration by Thomas of York is also recorded by T. Stubbs, Scriptt. 1707. The true story is given in another manuscript of Florence, the reading of which is given by Mr. Thorpe in a note, and in which the entry of 1094 stands thus; “Ubi etiam Herebertum, Theotfordensem episcopum, pastorali baculo privavit. ”

“ Of this body the model, as well as the head, was the bishop of Salisbury. Under his direction there grew up a trained body of administrators, most of them clerks like himself, several being his own near relatives, and almost all upstarts—novi homines, “new men” in the phrase of the time—compared with the nobles whose fathers had come over with the Conqueror ”

“ The barons went further; they sent an embassy to the Papal council of Lyons, where the Pope was presiding in person, when they declared, "We can no longer with any patience bear these oppressions. They are as detestable to God and man as they are intolerable to us; and, by the grace of God, we will no longer endure them."
Effigy of Jocelyn, Bishop of Salisbury. From a Tomb in Salisbury Cathedral.
But, so far from relaxing his hold, the Pope soon after sent an order demanding the half of all revenues of the non-resident clergy, and a third of those of the resident ones. ”

“ He acquired some reputation while filling the office of select preacher before the university in 1834, but in 1835 violently opposed the admission of dissenters to the colleges of Oxford. His scholarship and energy of character, however, recommended him to Lord Melbourne, and at the early age of thirty-six he was consecrated bishop of Salisbury (16 April 1837) , having on 5 April previously been created D.D. by his university. He immediately increased the number of Sunday services in the parish churches, and reformed the mode of conducting confirmations. ”

“ Everybody then remembered what his seventeen years' episcopate had done for the diocese of Salisbury. Many were able to justify and increase their estimation of the services which he had rendered to the diocese by comparison with results of preceding episcopates. Then it was that men looked back on the past, and observed how silently and imperceptibly ecclesiastical institutions and an ecclesiastical system had grown up amongst and around them—had covered the surface and penetrated into the heart of the diocese. ”

“ The Author hopes he may be pardoned, if he ventures, in further illustration of his principles on this subject, to make an extract from his sermon lately preached at the consecration of the Bishop of Salisbury. "In his intercourse with those Christians whose sentiments do not coincide with our own, the Christian minister will never by laxity of expression or conduct encourage in any an indifference to truth and error, nor countenance the insidious workings of latitudinarian principles. He will ever maintain the truth, but never with acrimony ”

“ Moreover the law of residence must be interpreted with reasonableness, and such pleas as ill-health and the smallness of a prebend are not to be disregarded. As the archbishop writes as legate, the letter cannot be earlier than 1195. Richard Poore became dean of Salisbury in 1198, and the pressure upon absentee canons probably originated with his reforming zeal. The statutes of Bishop Osmund, which had made Salisbury the model of a reformed cathedral after the Norman Conquest, had expressly recognised the right of the archbishop to call away one canon at any time for his own purposes ”

“ The celebrated cathedral, which in some respects may be considered the earliest in England, is the chief object at Salisbury, and was founded by Bishop Poore in 1220. It was the first great church built in the Early English style, and its spire is among the most imposing Gothic constructions in existence. The city of Salisbury is unique in having nothing Roman, Saxon, or Norman in its origin, and in being even without the remains of a baronial fortress. ”

“ They are not indeed in a contemporary document, but written in a thirteenth-century hand in a new version of these statutes made on the removal of the cathedral from Old Sarum to the present Salisbury in 1220. There seems no reason to doubt their authenticity.
These are the dignities and customs of the church of Salisbury which I, Osmund, bishop of the same church, in the name of the Holy Trinity, in the year 1091, have instituted and granted to the persons and canons of the same, with the advice of the Archbishop and the assent of King William. ”

“ About a hundred and fifty years ago a stone monument to one of these boy bishops was discovered in Salisbury cathedral, under the seats near the pulpit, from whence it was removed to the north part of the nave between the pillars, and covered over with a box of wood, to the great admiration of those, who, unacquainted with the anomalous character it designed to commemorate, thought it “almost impossible that a bishop should be so small in person, or a child so great in clothes.” ”

“ In Salisbury cathedral, says Mr. Lethieullier, I found two very ancient stone figures of bishops, which were brought from Old Sarum, and are consequently older than the time of king Henry the third. In that church, likewise, the pompous marble which lies over Nicholas Longespee, bishop of that see, and son of the, Earl of Salisbury, who died in the year 1297, appears to have been richly plated, though the brass is now quite gone, and is one of 327the most early of that kind which has been met with. Frequently, where there are no effigies, crosiers or crosses denote an ecclesiastic. ”

“ Peter's in the East, at Oxford, accompanied his elevation to the episcopate. He was at all times ready to assist his clergy in the performance of divine service. Not only did he frequently preach upon public occasions in different parts of his diocese, and continually in his own cathedral, but once every Sunday in one of the churches of Salisbury, often twice, sometimes, but a short time before his death, three times, though his delicate frame was unfit for exertions which visibly undermined his health. ”

“ Bishop Roger of Salisbury was not only a powerful ecclesiastic but the royal justiciar, the head of all the courts and the treasurer of all the money of the king. Under him was a set of clerks who would set the fashion for one school of the clergy, secular in mind and aim and manners; often married men, so far as their right to marry can be accounted valid, canons of cathedrals where they provided for their children and made estates for themselves ”

“ WORDSWORTH, JOHN (1843–1911) , bishop of Salisbury, was elder son of Christopher Wordsworth [q. v.] , bishop of Lincoln, by his wife Susanna Hatley, daughter of George Frere. His brother is Christopher Wordsworth, master of St. Nicholas' Hospital, Salisbury, and formerly fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Among his five sisters were Elizabeth, first principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and Susan (d. 1912) , first head of the Southwark Diocesan Society of Grey Ladies. He was born on 21 Sept. ”